Art and antiques news from 2004

EARLIER this year, when Comic Book Postal Auctions sold a copy of Beano No.1 for a record £11,000, I briefly looked into the reasons why Dandy, which preceded Beano by several months, is not quite so avidly pursued and looked forward to seeing just how much the next Dandy No. 1 to come to auction might make.

ON July 15, Bonhams will present a double-catalogue sale of 500 lots of natural history books and watercolours from a single collection and one of the highlights will be a very special copy of Audebert & Viellot’s Oiseaux dorés ou a reflets metalliques... of 1800-02.

The primary artistic influence behind the Prattware phenomenon that captivated Victorian society for 40 years was the freelance artist and engraver Jesse Austin (1806-1879).

AFTER four years, from July 9 to 11, Harrogate-based Galloway Antiques Fairs return to Alnwick Castle, Northumberland to revive their Alnwick Castle Antiques Fair.

DEALERS should be aware of a stolen cheque scam that targets regular Internet bankers.

THIS technical marvel of the ancient world, pictured right, known as a Roman glass diatretum or cage cup, was cut out of a single blank of glass to form two layers. The solid inner cup is linked to its outer cage only by a series of delicate struts.

TWENTIETH century and Contemporary art underlined their status as the key growth areas for the major auction houses when London’s June round of Part I Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales netted £120.4m. Six months ago the equivalent sales took £94m, while back in June 2003 – when war was raging in Iraq – they could only muster a relatively modest £81m.

AN ambitious project to record every oil painting in public ownership across the UK has started with the backing of leading lights of the art world.

BONHAMS are to set up separate client trust accounts for vendors to protect their money during the sale process. They are the first of the three major international auction houses to do so and the move effectively throws the gauntlet down to Sotheby’s and Christie’s to follow suit.

THE remarkable sums paid in London for high quality Islamic works of art arrived in the provinces in June.

THE first victory for a new art recovery company, a statue stolen from one of Yorkshire’s finest stately homes almost two years ago has been recovered in Chicago.

EDINBURGH dealer Andrew Fletcher, who as Twentieth Century Antiques specialises in original works from 1920-1970, normally trades via his website or by appointment, but for the duration of the Edinburgh Festival he is taking space at Concrete Butterfly, a large complex at 317-319 Cowgate in the Old Town which retails furniture and interior design.

THE British Antiques & Collectables Awards 2004 shortlist has been published, with the winners due to be announced at the beginning of August.

Silver made in London has borne the distinctive leopard symbol hallmark since 1300 AD, making it one of the earliest forms of consumer protection.

AUCTIONS are often the best way of settling whether a work is genuine or not. Of the speculative entries in Christie’s South Kensington’s 584-lot sale on June 11, most were contested by Hong Kong and mainland Chinese dealers. Before the sale, trade and auction specialist opinion was divided as to whether this 10 1/2in (27cm) high blue and white vase (shown right) was a Yongzheng (1723-35) mark and period vessel or a 19th/20th century copy as catalogued.

EDINBURGH dealer Andrew Fletcher, who as Twentieth Century Antiques specialises in original works from 1920-1970, normally trades via his website or by appointment, but for the duration of the Edinburgh Festival he is taking space at Concrete Butterfly, a large complex at 317-319 Cowgate in the Old Town which retails furniture and interior design.

IT was amongst the shaded woodland of the Thames Valley that Windsor chairs are thought to have originated. The forerunners of their kind may have been merely a humble form of seating, but, as two lots in forthcoming English furniture sales show, it wasn’t long before the form began to branch out.

THE widow of Baron Heini von Thyssen, the billionaire art collector, has loaned a huge new collection to the museum he founded in Madrid, the Thyssen Bornemisza.

OVER the years, the collaboration between Sotheby’s Sussex and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust has done much to fill in the gaps left by the lack of detailed company records of Coalbrookdale furniture, and the May sale at Billingshurst, which featured 86 lots amassed over a number of years by a dealer/collector, offered another opportunity to assess the market.

FOSSILS, whose decorative qualities in either antique or contemporary settings, have made them a regular feature of Sotheby’s garden sales at Billingshurst, opened the May event with 100 lots. Although dealers have become interested in the genre (there are, for example, now stands selling natural history at Olympia), private buyers took the top offerings including the best seller, a detail of which is shown right.