Art and antiques news from 2004

PEAK District dealers Peter and Sonia Allerston also provide an interior design service from their premises at Elmton, Derbyshire. Now they have combined the two areas to take their own show on the road to drum up business.

SOME weeks ago, I reported that preparations were going well for Robert Bailey’s 54th annual Northern Antiques Fair which this year leaves Harrogate and moves to, arguably, the most prestigious venue in the county, Harewood House, near Leeds, stately home of Lord and Lady Harewood.

ON the weekend of September 25 and 26 London-based Dianne and Ivor Brick, who trade as Amherst Antiques, hold their seventh annual selling exhibition of Tunbridge Ware in the home town of their speciality.

THE backbone of Bonhams’ September 3 car sale at Goodwood Motor Circuit in Sussex was the little-known but highly impressive collection of the late George Milligen.

WHILE Brian Haughton celebrates the botanical beauties of fine Chelsea, an altogether more prosaic, but nonetheless interesting, ceramic encounter is under scrutiny in Kensington Church Street.

REGULAR readers of Scott Reyburn’s Art Market will be only too aware that many equestrian paintings by Sir Alfred James Munnings (1878-1959) have in recent years shown significant increases in value. As he reported as recently as Antiques Trade Gazette No 1648, July 17, Munnings’ oil sketch Newmarket Cheveley was the only work to dramatically exceed its estimate in Sotheby’s Important British Picture sale on July 1.

RIGHT: sold for £3600 in a Rupert Toovey sale of July 13 was a 1485 edition of Abraham ben Me’ir ibn Ezra’s De navitatibus, printed by Erhard Ratdolt of Venice and illustrated with a single full-page woodcut and other letterpress diagrams.

IT IS ten years since well-known dealer Richard Gardner moved into Petworth, West Sussex. Today, even in a town known internationally as one of the most notable concentrations of antiques trading in the South of England, Mr Gardner can certainly be said to have made his mark.

AFTER two and a half years of exile from organising (following the sale of Cooper Antiques Fairs to Sue Ede) Reg Cooper, is delighted to be back on the scene.

THE Rates of Merchandise, that is to say, Subsidy of Tonnage, ...Poundage and ...Woollen Clothes, or Old-Drapery, as they are Rated and Agreed on by the Commons House of Parliament..., a 1660 copy in rebacked contemporary calf of the book of rates required by the passing of that year’s Act of Tonnage and Poundage, was sold for £1000 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of June 17.

OVERLAPPING with the start of the Biennale (September 15-19) will be the third annual Parcours des Mondes, a Left Bank gallery trail featuring 50 tribal art dealers.

OVERLAPPING with the start of the Biennale (September 15-19) will be the third annual Parcours des Mondes, a Left Bank gallery trail featuring 50 tribal art dealers.

CHELSEA antiques centre Antiquarius has been looking a bit tired of late but its new manager Neil Jackson is determined to put the pep back into the enterprise, which was launched at 131-141 King’s Road, SW3 in 1970 by antiques market pioneer Bennie Gray and is now owned by Atlantic Antiques Centres.

ANTIQUES never have a low profile in Harrogate, but over the next few weeks they will dominate the North Yorkshire town with three fairs in the vicinity and the numerous antiques shops and galleries making a special effort to impress the autumn visitors, traditionally many of them antiques tourists.

ROBIN Butler’s new book on The Albert Collection: Five hundred years of British and European Silver, is a survey of one man’s 30-year dedication to assembling a collection. The owner commissioned Mr Butler to produce a survey of his mammoth and wide-ranging assemblage of over 700 pieces before his death, and, after he died, his widow wanted the task to be completed.

RIGHT: first editions of The Adventures... and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1892 and 1894) that sold as a pair for £4800 in a Dominic Winter sale of August 25.

SOME weeks ago, I reported that preparations were going well for Robert Bailey’s 54th annual Northern Antiques Fair which this year leaves Harrogate and moves to, arguably, the most prestigious venue in the county, Harewood House, near Leeds, stately home of Lord and Lady Harewood.

A DEALER from Melbourne, Australia was one of the first through the doors, and certainly the most welcome visitor at Caroline Penman’s first Bury St. Edmunds Antiques Fair, held at the Athenaeum in the Suffolk market town from September 3 to 5.

SOME provincial auctioneers and London’s major houses batten down their hatches during the traditionally dead month of August, but for Scarborough Perry (15% buyer's premium) it was business as usual for their August 12-13 sale.

THE Rates of Merchandise, that is to say, Subsidy of Tonnage, ...Poundage and ...Woollen Clothes, or Old-Drapery, as they are Rated and Agreed on by the Commons House of Parliament..., a 1660 copy in rebacked contemporary calf of the book of rates required by the passing of that year’s Act of Tonnage and Poundage, was sold for £1000 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of June 17.