Art and antiques news from 2004

WITH a turnover last year in excess of £5 million, Vectis, who are based in Stockton-on-Tees, are well known as the world’s largest auctioneers of toys. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the company also organise shows and, for some years, have put together the successful London Toy Soldier Show at The Royal National Hotel in London’s Bloomsbury.

The Parrot Pen-man, an ink and watercolour drawing by Quentin Blake that sold for £1200, was among 40 lots offered at Sotheby’s on July 8 on behalf of the Arvon Foundation, a literary charity that provides residential creative writing courses.

REGULAR events though they are among High Street traders great and small, cut-price sales are still relatively rare in the antiques trade. In recent years a few dealers have used this tried- and-trusted format to boost turnover in sleepy times, but sale days remain an exception.

NEW York City is never a shy and retiring place, but its profile will be bigger and brasher than ever from August 30 to September 2 when the Republican Party Convention takes over Madison Square Garden.

FIVE previously unknown photographic prints by Edgar Degas totalled €380,000 (£253,335) at Beaussant-Lefèvre (20.93/11.96% buyer’s premium) on July 2. All featured group portraits taken at the Paris home of Degas’s friend, the painter Henri Lerolle (1848-1929), and were consigned by Lerolle’s descendants.

LIKE other ex-Peralta-Ramos lots that have cropped up in recent weeks, this pair of 1934 firsts of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius the God bore a red inked Chinese ownership stamp, but both were inscribed by the author in 1958, at a time when he was giving a lecture in Detroit, and they sold for $5500 (£2990) in a Sotheby’s New York sale of June 17.

EARLY bookings for Antiquaris Barcelona suggest that next year’s 29th annual staging of one of Spain’s top fairs will be markedly more international than it was earlier this year.

I HAVE often illustrated plates from the works of Maria Sibylla Merian, but never before a portrait of that remarkable lady herself.

EIGHT market-fresh female bronzes by Aristide Maillol, ranging in height from 8-12in (20-30cm) and designed between 1896 and 1905, surfaced in the Binoche (20% buyer’s premium) saleroom on July 2.

THE June 11 Aguttes (20.33% buyer’s premium) sale was dominated by late 19th century pictures, including this 1891 Venetian Conversation, seen right, 2ft 5in x 3ft 4in (73 x 1.01m), by American artist Julius Leblanc Stewart (1855-1919), who often painted Venetian scenes – Kaiser Wilhelm II acquired his Sirocco Effects in 1895. The work here claimed a handsome €85,000 (£56,665).

PETWORTH dealer Richard Gardner never seems to let up, but he is taking some time off to celebrate this week since the West Sussex town, with its 38 showrooms and some 75 dealers, has just won the BACA award for best antiques town/village.

FAIRS organiser Jackie Raleigh of Newbury, Berkshire has sold her company Silhouette Fairs to Andy and Sheila Briggs of Oxfordshire-based Fat Cat Fairs.

FAIRS two weekends running at opposite ends of England make for a busy programme for the Harrogate organisers Galloway, beginning with their Naworth Castle Antiques Fair at Brampton, near Carlisle in Cumbria on August 20 to 22.

LONG-TIME readers may recall that I used to wonder why East Anglia, such a fertile ground for everything from agriculture to antiques shops, remained something of a wasteland in terms of fairs. What, I asked, held organisers back? The place may be a little off the beaten track but it is rich in artistic heritage from Cotman and Constable to Munnings, it has history from Hereward to Nelson and there has always been money from medieval wool days through to the present acres of wheatfields.

DEALERS are, traditionally, very secretive about their restorers, whose services are probably the most vital of any to the trade, and seldom do top restorers cross over and become dealers.

CINOA, the international confederation of associations of art and antiques dealers, is to sponsor an annual prize to celebrate major contributions to scholarship and the arts.

THE long month of August may be a good time to relax, but for glass enthusiasts the end of the month offers the perfect chance to get the pulse racing once again.

THE most sought-after and best-performing English factory amongst the more select gatherings of English wares at Sotheby’s Bond Street sale was undoubtedly Chelsea. The auctioneers had 16 lots to offer, mostly consigned from one collection and of the currently fashionable Red Anchor period botanical type either in their painted decoration or shape.

ENGLISH and Continental glassware was also a feature of Sotheby’s June and July ceramics sales. It accounted for just over 30 per cent of the more affordable Olympia offering, where around two-thirds of the 115 lots changed hands, and just under a fifth of their Bond Street sale where around half the 33 lots found buyers.

THE story of the Boscobel Oak that gave numerous pubs a name also, after 1660, became an object of Royalist pilgrimage. By 1680 a protective wall was built round the trunk but, such was the souvenir hunting, by the early 18th century the tree had almost been destroyed. The oak at Boscobel today is almost certainly a descendant and not the one where Charles Stuart spent a sleepless night as he fled Cromwell’s heavies.