Art and antiques news from 2004

MAYFAIR dealers in things tribal, unusual and exotic, the Gordon Reece Gallery, are currently holding one of their periodic selling exhibitions of antique Chinese furniture at 16 Clifford Street, W1.

KENT English furniture dealer Michael Sim holds his fifth Special Summer Exhibition of Scottish & English Barometers throughout the month of June at his showrooms in Royal Parade, Chislehurst.

AT its seventh staging, the popular Hali fair at Olympia is undergoing some major changes, not the least of which is a name change. The event is now titled The Hali Fair: Carpets, Textiles and Tribal Art. The duration of the fair has been extended from four to 10 days and it will take place in the National Hall Gallery at Olympia from June 3 to 13, at the same time as the summer Fine Art & Antiques Fair. The fairs will be linked allowing easy access between the two.

SALES of Victoria Cross groups continue to set new auction records.

MORTON and Eden continue to make great strides considering how short a time they have existed. On April 22 they held their first sale abroad – in Milan in collaboration with Sotheby’s. Indeed, that firm is descended from the now closed Sotheby’s coin department.

IN this busy spring season – the busiest for some years – Spink’s have been batting hard. March 31 saw a fine sale which netted £626,750. But, not content with that, they fielded another 632-lot sale a fortnight later, on April 15. Again this sale referred mainly to British and related coins. However, the first 131 lots were devoted to the ancient world.

Despite the important nature of many items being sold to militaria and weapons specialists at the Marlow rooms of Bosleys (15% buyer's premium) on March 10, there were, as usual, a number of more domestic objects included.

Right: this fine Nantgarw porcelain plate, once thought to be painted by Thomas Baxter and traditionally known as the ‘Three Graces’, was part of a collection of porcelain offered by Worcestershire auctioneers Philip Serrell on May 20.

ON The Wall is the name of a new fair aimed at the contemporary art market which will be launched from September 29 to October 3 at the Grand Hall, Olympia.

FRANCE'S national auction watchdog, the Conseil des Ventes, has banned the firm Rey & Associés from all auction activity, for repeatedly staging sales without adequate insurance cover.

SOME 100 lots of silver and plate at Amersham Auction Rooms' (15% buyer's premium) April 1 400-lot sale largely bore out the current perception of the market that wine-related items will sell in an otherwise moribund market.

FINANCIAL information giants Bloomberg are to start providing an art market index on their 180,000 global terminals. Stockbrokers, traders, fund managers and investors from across the world will be able to access the Gabrius Art Market Indices in an attempt to provide a new information benchmark for the sector and to make the tools for analysing the art market more widely available to the financial sector.

THE Orient provided the most eye-catching highlights at Rupert Toovey's (15% buyer's premium) March 17-19 sale, in the form of a set of four Japanese Satsuma plates signed by Kinkozan and an 18th century Chinese bamboo carving.

RECENTLY renamed and relocated, Bloomsbury Auctions have launched an Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art department.

LAST week’s High Court judgement on the dispute over the gilded urns sold by Christie’s to Taylor Lynne Thomson should not prompt any dramatic changes to traditional cataloguing practice.

ANOTHER piece of wine-related silver was among the better sellers at Olivers (10% buyer's premium) April 1 sale in the form of an Edwardian monteith.

Right: among the highlights of the three-day on-the-premises house sale conducted by Woolley & Wallis at Ashley Manor, near Stockbridge, Hampshire from May 18-20 was this 11 1/2in (29cm) high bronze cast of a winsome puppy by Dame Elizabeth Frink (1930-1993).

THE unexceptional contents of a Scottish country house may have furnished Mallams (15% buyer's premium) April 28 304-lot outing with three-quarters of its entries, but it was the decorative, ornamental works from a variety of other private sources which provided many of the highlights.

ANOTHER piece of wine-related silver was among the better sellers at Olivers (10% buyer's premium) April 1 sale in the form of an Edwardian monteith.

APPEAL Court judges have lifted the punishment given to a London dealer convicted of handling £1.5m worth of stolen silver after hearing how he had committed the crimes in order to pay for his wife’s cancer treatment.