Art and antiques news from 2004

TRADE Space, the antiques trade warehouse, have promised to set up shop in smaller premises after closing their Newark premises suddenly.

IN reporting the sale of the John R.B. Brett-Smith library at Sotheby’s on May 27 (Antiques Trade Gazette No 1646, July 3), I mentioned and illustrated the sale at £2800 of a work of 1679 called Female Poems on Several Occasions written by Ephelia.

THE servants’ quarters, very much a part of the history of any great house, are always hugely popular with visitors and the National Trust was keen to buy items at Christie’s (19.5/12% buyer's premium) Chirk Castle sale on June 21 which represented life below stairs.

THE ups and, more depressingly, the downs of the market this year make the results of a steady day’s selling of material put together by Nigel Papworth at Diamond Mills’ (11.75% buyer's premium) Felixstowe rooms at the end of June look positively encouraging.

“WHEN Mr Woods came into our saleroom and invited us to see his collection,” said Anderson & Garland’s collectables specialist John Anderson, “we just couldn’t believe that such a unique selection of memorabilia could have been sitting in a house only a dozen miles from our premises.”

EVERY country house sale should have at least one sleeper and at Christie's (19.5/12% buyer's premium) Chirk Castle sale this honour went to a sandstone grave slab.

A Dial in your Poke by Mike Cowham, published privately. £29.50, plus p&p: UK £4.50, Europe £5.50, rest of the world including USA £10.00.

SET in 200 acres of Surrey farmland, Cranleigh School is one of those ideal English settings for a high-summer fair, as Harrogate-based Galloway Fairs are well aware. They have been organising events at the famous public school for 11 years and their next Cranleigh School Antiques Fair will be held from July 23 to 25.

CHRISTIE'S have strengthened their photography and 20th century design team by appointing Joshua Holdeman, formerly international director of photographs at Phillips, de Pury & Co.

DECADES before Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde sheep and the 1990s explosion of Britart, London was swinging to the rhythm of Pop Art’s movers and shakers. Forty years have now passed since the height of this international movement prompting Christie’s South Kensington (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) to host the first of what they hope will become an annual Pop Art themed sale on June 30.

LEOMINSTER auctioneer Brightwells will offer the lifetime collection of recorded sound enthusiast Don Watson, in a single vendor sale on July 29.

RIGHT: despite the occasionally negative press the antiques trade has received in recent weeks a media circus arrived at Sotheby’s on July 7 to watch the Bond Street auctioneers sell Young Woman Seated at the Virginals, a newly-acknowledged picture by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75).

IN its latest published results, Partridge have recorded a significant fall in both turnover and profits citing again the very difficult trading conditions.

ROUNDING off the European furniture, carpets and works of art sale at Christie’s South Kensington (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) on June 15 was a 78-lot collection of hall stands, mostly made in cast iron.

AT Scarborough Perry Fine Arts' (15% buyer's premium) June 24-25 sale, auctioneer Stephen Perry, who had given a distressed Regency painted settee sofa a modest pre-sale estimate of £400, admitted ruefully after seeing it go for ten times that amount: “I can value furniture in general but I find it difficult to value interior decorator’s pieces.”

THOMAS Rowlandson’s (1756-1827) watercolour Place des Victoires, Paris (estimated £60,000-80,000) failed to find a buyer when offered at Sotheby’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 1.

FOR 71 of his 84 years Harry Davis (1885-1969) worked as a decorator at the Royal Worcester factory, ultimately rising to the post of foreman painter. He painted a wide variety of subjects, but is best known for his sheep-decorated landscapes, all produced in the first quarter of the 20th century.

SINCE 1986 Christopher Gange has been a dealer in 20th Century British Art at his Katharine House Gallery at The Parade, Marlborough, Wiltshire, but for the month of July, in a new departure, he is holding an important selling exhibition of British Studio Pottery, formerly part of his private collection.

LONDON organisers Brian and Anna Haughton, organisers of the International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show in New York, have added some distinnguished new faces to their line-up for their 16th staging of the fair at Manhattan’s Seventh Regiment Armory from October 22 to 28.

STAYING with idyllic summer settings, next month Sussex organiser Ron Beech hosts his one fair of the year, the annual Lindfield Antiques Fair, which has been running at the King Edward Hall in the West Sussex village near Haywards Heath for 37 years.