Art and antiques news from 2005

AFTER a decade at the venue, Essex-based organiser Robert Bailey has decided not to stage his flagship fair at Claridge’s hotel in London this April.

For the second year running, Christie’s posted the highest auction total in Paris, with sales of €86.4m (£61.7m), up five per cent on last year.

The Elizabethan communion cup of St Peter-with-Bastwick, Repps, pictured right, was stolen from a safe on the weekend of January 1-2.

Star billing at Christie’s King Street sale of selected English and Continental ceramics on December 6 went to three Meissen Augustus Rex covered baluster jars of 1740 with the AR monogram and Dreher’s marks XII to the base.

ATG have an update on the round-up of provincial sale totals for 2004 published in issue 1672, January 15.

SOTHEBY’S have launched a new international craft award by choosing two winners.

Four antique clocks and two barometers were stolen in a raid on Chislehurst Antiques in Kent in late December.

THE New Barnham Auction rooms have just held their first fine art and antiques sale – only five weeks after taking over the premises.

Hamptons Fine Art Auctioneers have become the latest regional auction business to join The Fine Art Auction Group, parent company of Dreweatt Neate Fine Art and Neales of Nottingham.

BACK in London, until February 12, Mayfair purveyors of ethnographic and tribal items, the Gordon Reece Gallery, hold a sale of their current stock of antique rugs at their gallery at 16 Clifford Street, London W1. Rugs are offered at half price and, in true High Street clearance style, will be replaced daily “while stocks last”.

A new auction high for the Neapolitan Impressionist Vincenzo Irolli (1860-1949) was established by Sotheby’s (20-15.42% buyer’s premium, excluding VAT) last month in Milan when they offered this oil on canvas entitled La Pesca Fortunata (A good haul) in their sale of 19th century pictures on December 13.

The Fine Art Auction Group have raised their buyer’s premium across their network of provincial salerooms.

What makes a painting totally uncommercial one year and a sure-fire seller the next?Clearly, if there was a general principal of financial success to be learned in the art market there would be rather more dealers appearing in the media’s annual rich lists than there are now.

SOME areas of the art market seem impervious to the changing winds of taste. One is quality pictures of great European cities by recognised artists which appeal across the usual boundaries of generations and national borders.

The last day of November saw a 633-lot sale at Spink (15% buyer’s premium). In all, this was a very successful sale; the failure rate being a negligible three per cent. The total was £415,486.

British medals are realising ever higher prices and it seems that buyers almost invariably hail from these sceptred isles.

A massive gulf exists between the very best quality Meiji period (1868-1912) works and the rest.

STUDENTS at Southampton Institute will benefit from a five-year bursary programme set up by the Society of Fine Art Auctioneers and Valuers and funded by former SOFAA chairman Christopher Weston.

The Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum have added two paintings by Joseph Southall (1861-1944) to their internationally recognised collection of British Arts & Crafts.

By and large the Cumbrian antiques trade were counting their blessings last week after escaping the worst of the floods that engulfed the region.