Art and antiques news from 2004

THERE was a 1954-55 first edition set of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books in a Sotheby’s sale of July 8 that sold at £6500 to a collector – all three volumes impressions in slightly frayed jackets, one of them with a tape repair, showing a little browning and spotting.

PICK of the recent Beatrix Potters were seen in the Dominic Winter sale of June 24, where the 1903 first of The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, seen right, complete with printed glassine jacket (showing some spine and edge loss) and inscribed as a Christmas gift at the time by the author to a Mrs Lord, was sold at £7600 to Hawthorn Books, who gave a further £7600 for a jacketed, 1904 first of The Tale of Benjamin Bunny that Beatrix Potter inscribed to Mrs Lord.

A Christie’s New York sale of June 9 included a collection of Dr Seuss books, illustrated letters and other ephemera formed by Jed Mattes, who in 1977, following the death of Theodor Geisel’s long-term agent Phyllis Jackson, took over as his representative.

TRADITIONAL and contemporary work will be rolled out for the eighth annual Boston International Fine Art Show in The Cyclorama at The Boston Center for the Arts, Tremont Street from November 11 to 14.

FOUNDED in 1986, the Shelley Group is a collectors’ society dedicated to amassing and appreciating the china products made in Fenton, Staffordshire by the Wileman and Shelley companies during the 19th and 20th centuries.

THE very fine 1950 first edition copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seen right, with just a few nicks to the jacket skilfully repaired, was sold for £6000 to a collector by Bloomsbury Auctions on June 17, but at Sotheby’s on July 8, a complete set of the seven books that make up C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia was left unsold on an estimate of £5000-7000.

SECOND generation Mayfair antiquities dealership Charles Ede Ltd, issue four catalogues a year devoted to different areas of their speciality, and they have just published their illustrated volume listing the Etruscan and Roman Antiquities currently available at their showroom at 20 Brook Street.

A LARGE scale oil by Kathleen Hale of Orlando Reclining Amongst Flowers failed to sell against a £10,000-15,000 estimate at Sotheby’s on July 8, but the autograph draft manuscript of Orlando (The Marmalade Cat) becomes a Doctor of 1944, right, each page with pencil and coloured crayon drawings (some with added wash or gouache, a few unfinished) did sell at £5000 to a London gallery.

THE pencilled Assumption (with white highlights), 20 x 15in (50 x 37cm), shown right, turned up at Doutrebente on June 25 with a €4000 estimate.

AFTER June in London, the first major fair on the calendar is the long-established summer version of Antiques For Everyone at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham. It will be held this year in Halls 17-19 from July 29 to August 1.

THERE is never any shortage of news from the Hundred Acre Wood and this summer’s helpings included, at the very basic level, the straightforward 1926 first of Winnie the Pooh seen top right, a little rubbed and darkened to the spine, which brought a bid of £1350 (Sotherans) at a Dominic Winter sale of June 24.

SOTHEBY’S have announced that they are merging their Modern British art and Victorian art departments to create a new one called British Art 1850 – Present Day.

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.

SMALL, original and honest – these classic qualities took a 2ft 5in x 2ft 6 1/2in (74x 77cm) George I walnut chest to the top of the sales chart at Aldridges’ (15% buyer's premium) 344-lot May 25 sale where it took £3100.

ENORMOUS pre-sale speculation surrounded the 25-lot single-owner antiquities sale that came under the hammer at Bonhams Bond Street (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) on July 14, not least because the vendor was strongly rumoured in the trade to be the world’s most prolific collector, Sheikh Saud of Qatar.

“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.”

IT was, perhaps, a telling sign of the current shortage of high-quality, market-fresh Old Master paintings in the salerooms that Bonhams (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) July 7 Old Master Paintings sale should be headed by this hitherto unrecorded John Constable (1776-1837) plein air oil on canvas sketch, right, of the artist’s home village, East Bergholt.

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 GANG slashed patrol car tyres at Petworth police station before launching an audacious burglary at an antiques shop in the town, escaping with hundreds of pieces of silver.

BASED in Stoke-on-Trent, auctioneers Louis Taylor (buyer’s premium 12.5 per cent) are better known for their ceramics than their pictures but their quarterly Fine sale held from June 14-16 was led by this Dorothea Sharp oil on canvas, right, Children with a Dog on a Summer’s Day.