Art and antiques news from 2004

Right: sold for £4200 in the July 21 sale held by Lyon & Turnbull at Jordanstone, an Ayrshire country house, was Rowlandson’s The Comforts of Bath, a set of a dozen prints issued by Fores in 1798, and here loosely inserted in an album of full red crushed morocco.

OMENS could not be better for the 20/21 British Art Fair, which, from September 15 to 19, returns to its roots at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 after a couple of years down the road at The Commonwealth Institute.

SOLD for £30,000 at Bonhams on July 15 (as part of the big natural history sale) was a rare series of six mid-18th century engravings dealing with the training of racehorses.

ILLUSTRATED right is the opening page of a 1468 paper manuscript copy (in period-style panelled calf with period clasps) of Jacob de Voragine’s 13th century history of the lives of the saints, Legenda Aurea – otherwise decorated with rubricated initials throughout – that with some staining to the opening leaves sold at $18,000 (£9780) in a Bonhams & Butterfields of San Francisco sale of June 28.

JUST a taster for one of the greatest antiques shows on earth, the XX11 Paris Biennale Des Antiquaires, which will run at the Carrousel du Louvre in the heart of the French capital from September 15 to 28, with the vernissage on September 14.

MIDDLESBROUGH specialist in Moorcroft, Carlton Ware and Linthorpe pottery Jim Shaw, better known as Appleton Antiques, has given up his stands at the Red House Antiques Centre, York and The Ginnel, Harrogate, although he keeps a toehold in the latter, renting a cabinet.

INNOVATIVE Oxfordshire dealers The Country Seat may be best known as furniture specialists, but they are increasingly turning their focus towards 19th and 20th century design.

CAPE Cod auctioneers Eldred’s of East Dennis had a busy August schedule and results from their series of Asian and Americana sales will appear in future US Selections, but seen here are two of the 970 lots found in an August 12-13 sale of Fine & Decorative Art.

A POSTER sale held by Swanns of New York on August 4 was strong on recruitment and propaganda posters of WWI and WWII. A condition-A copy of “the best known American poster of all time”, the famous Uncle Sam image of 1917 seen top right, was sold at $9000 (£4950). Based on the well-known British poster featuring Lord Kitchener, it was originally produced by illustrator James Montgomery Flagg as a magazine cover and is in fact a self-portrait of the artist.

SOMETHING in the region of $1.2m (£660,000) was taken at a July 31-August 1 sale held by the Neal Auction Company of New Orleans and two 20th century photographs (one reproduced right) were among the more successful lots.

PLENTY of art and antiques on offer around the capital this month but the imaginative Mayfair tribal art specialists the Gordon Reece Gallery have come up with a different take on the decorative, with a selling exhibition they hold at 16 Clifford Street, London W1 until October 2.

IN 1784, settlers in what is now North Carolina and eastern Tennessee put together a plan for a new state that was to be named in honour of Benjamin Franklin.

RIGHT: though I suspected a sub-text, this black letter broadside, printed “at London in the Olde Baily by Richard Lant for Thomas Porefut in Paules Churchyard at the sygne of Lucrese”, seems to offer a straightforward account (in a translation by Renolde Olyver) of a violent storm and consequent disasters that took place at Mechlin [Malines], near Antwerp, in August 1546.

HERTFORDSHIRE organiser Paul Bishop, who founded Oxbridge Fairs to mount specialist glass events, holds his fourth Cambridge Glass Fair at Chilford Hall Vineyard, Linton, Cambridgeshire this Sunday (September 12) and, with 100 tables, it is fully booked.

OFFERED by Christie’s New York on June 25 was a magnificent unbound set of the plates that make up Audubon’s great Birds of America (1827-38) that came from the library of the Dukes of Saxe-Meiningen in Thuringia.

ORGANISED by the Cotswold Art & Antique Dealers’ Association, in association with the Thames Valley Antique Dealers’ Association, a fun day out with, hopefully, a bit of business thrown in, is promised at the annual swap shop and dealers’ cricket match at Stow-on-the-Wold next Tuesday, September 14.

AS usual, the London Photograph Fair is fully booked for the event this Sunday (September 12) at the Bonnington Hotel in London’s Bloomsbury, WC2.

SOLD for £25,000 at Sotheby’s on June 25 was a group of letters, documents and sketches by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, or Il Guercino [the ‘Squinter’], his painter nephew, Benedetto Gennari and his patron Claudio Bertazzoli, that relate to the former’s altarpiece for Santa Maria della Pieta dei Teatini in Ferrara – The Purification of the Virgin.

FOR their selling exhibition of 70 Japanese woodblock prints to the end of November, the Japanese Gallery at 66D Kensington Church Street, London W8 have chosen the theme Snow, Moon & Flowers.

IN a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6, a 1678 first (in full panelled calf) of Some Proposals for the imploying of the Poor. Especially in and about the City of London. And for the Prevention of Begging, the only known publication of the philanthropist Thomas Firmin, was sold at £1100.