Art and antiques news from 2006

Two lavish catalogues, a DVD, three days at Syon House, trips to the USA and Hong Kong, acres of press coverage… Sotheby’s and Christie’s apart, seldom can a UK auction house have devoted more time, more energy and more money to promoting a sale than Lyon & Turnbull did with the Drambuie Collection.

Pictures released of some of the stolen items

The Victoria & Albert Museum’s sculpture collection will be redisplayed this spring in the new Dorothy and Michael Hintze Galleries.

The London Assay Office is advising extra caution when buying antique silver following the assessment of spoons bearing forged marks submitted by four auctioneers last year.

THE Art Loss Register has announced the recovery of four valuable paintings stolen 27 years ago in a £30m theft.

A revamp of Cologne’s early spring fairs fest sees the amalgamation of the city’s three February fairs into one new five-day event to be held a week earlier in the year.

Establishing a new landmark for a picture lot sold at auction outside London, two portraits by Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) took £900,000 at Dreweatt Neate’s Donnington Priory salerooms last week.

Late January/early February has become the new slot for golfiana sales with events held by Bonhams Chester (January 28) and Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh (February 7).

Alongside the Americana offered in the New York salerooms earlier this month, there was a strong representation of early English ceramics. Sotheby’s January 20 sale of the pottery collection of Harriet Carlton Goldweitz was followed the next day by Christie’s auction of the Mrs J. Insley Blair collection, which included some key Staffordshire productions alongside its blue chip American furnishings.

A Susie Cooper vase sold for £3850 on eBay on January 13. The vase, which measures just over 12in (30cm) high, is decorated with a hunter in a loin cloth stalking two deer or ibex close to a stylised tree – an unrecorded design of around 1931 or ’32. Similar pieces are known from a publicity shot taken in the 1930s although most were thought to have been destroyed during a hit on the factory during the Blitz.

UK Government will campaign to exclude artists’ heirs permanently

AFTER 31 years Caroline Penman has axed her original London fixture, the West London Antiques Fair, which has been held at Kensington Town Hall every January since 1976.

BONHAMS have won a top award from Euromoney magazine for their client services.

An antiques dealer from Heathfield in Sussex has become the first British woman to complete the punishing Dakar Rally. The appropriately named Patsy Quick, owner of Toad Hall Antiques, set off on the 16-day trek on January 1 in Portugal, crossing Spain and Africa in the 5600-mile trip to Dakar, Senegal. She crossed the finish line on her motorbike one place ahead of her partner, Clive Town.

On a cold January 26 night in Edinburgh, a packed saleroom at Lyon & Turnbull witnessed a defining moment in the Scottish art market.

A funding package worth £7m has been agreed allowing construction to begin on a new Wedgwood Museum in the heart of the Potteries at the company’s Barlaston headquarters.

ALONGSIDE, Tom Jones, Bruce Forsyth and the Ashes winning cricket team, the New Year’s honours list featured Richard Dennis.

Christie’s will test the potentially lucrative waters of the Middle Eastern market in situ by holding an inaugural sale in Dubai this spring.

Next month the Royal Observatory, Greenwich will unveil four new galleries designed to tell the story of precision timekeeping.

AGAINST a flurry of publicity on the subject, online registry of stolen valuables Swift-Find.com has launched a new initiative to help identify and reclaim Nazi looted art.