Art and antiques news from 2004

WITH its prevalence of antiques shops and auctioneers, one might imagine a degree of difficulty in locating a member of Cotswolds society untouched by the world of antiques.

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.

IT is not often that an antiques dealer ends up on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, but until September 19 that is just what is happening.

SHEER decorative exuberance helped this Roman mosaic panel, c.2nd century AD, right, sell to an American private collector for $260,000 (£141,305), almost triple the upper estimate at Sotheby’s New York (20/12% buyer's premium) sale of June 9.

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.”

REGULAR sales of toys, dolls and bears are among the specialist categories pinpointed for expansion by Brightwells (15% buyer’s premium) of Leominster.

THE Chelsea Flower Show may be just a fading memory, but Hove-based organiser Cindy Mainwaring, who has been putting together popular monthly fairs at Chelsea Old Town Hall for the past 26 years, is determined her fair this Sunday will be blooming.

WITH its prevalence of antiques shops and auctioneers, one might imagine a degree of difficulty in locating a member of Cotswolds society untouched by the world of antiques.

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.

IN the same week that Sotheby’s and Christie’s were offering their summer selections of English furniture, Bonhams’ Bond Street (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) offered a 224-lot English and Continental mix that also incorporated a sizeable selection of works of art. The broader mix didn’t result in a higher take-up: selling rates for this July 29 event were 54 per cent by lot and 65 in money on a £640,440 total.

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

DAVID Teniers the Younger’s whimsical 6 x 8 1/2in (16 x 22cm), oil on copper view of Monkeys Playing Cards, sold to a private buyer against the London trade for a double-estimate €220,000 (£146,665) at Tajan on June 24.

THE forerunners of their kind may have been a relatively humble form of seating, but, as two lots in the recent English furniture sales showed, it wasn’t long before the Windsor chair began to branch out.

DECORATIVE, functional and large – the undisputed highlight of Andrew Grant's (15% buyer's premium) 525-lot May 13 sale was a gilt-framed hall mirror catalogued as in the manner of William Kent.

THE Paris firm of Bourgey was founded in Paris in 1895. Now under the direction of the granddaughter of the founder, Sabine Bourgey, it is still going strong if the recent sale on June 3 is anything to go by.

WHILE much of the art dealing world struggles to keep its galleries open, one City-based family firm is actually expanding to two London showcases.

THE considerable coverage given to Asia Week in London, on these pages and in the national press, rather neglected one gallery which was bringing the art of the Orient to London long before the Asia week promotion was thought of.

SWEDEN’s top summer fair Antik 2004 has its 42nd annual staging from July 27 to August 1 at the Olympia Hall in the town of Helsingborg.

ONE of Wales’s premier regular antiques events, almost certainly the most popular, has its summer outing on the weekend of July 17 and 18 when The Carmarthen Antiques & Collectors’ Fair runs at the United Counties Showground.

AT its fifth annual staging from June 18 to 20, Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow reinforced its reputation as Scotland’s premier antiques event and, although it did not break the current pattern of very patchy fairs business, it is telling that already almost all the 116 exhibitors have rebooked for next year.