Art and antiques news from 2007

Sotheby’s have posted their highest price in Paris since the French auction market was opened to foreign firms in 2001.

Collectors of Clarice Cliff have voiced their opposition to increased auctioneers’ charges with some refusing to attend Christie’s latest sale of the popular Art Deco pottery.

ESTIMATED at just £1000-1500, a work catalogued as by a follower of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) has sold for £2.2m at the Gloucestershire saleroom of Moore, Allen & Innocent (15% buyer’s premium).

CLARION Arts, owners and organisers of the Olympia fairs, have announced a change of name for their June flagship fair – the third change of name in two years. It will run next year from June 5 to 15 as Olympia International Art & Antiques Fair.

THE Good Web Guide has just published its review of the Antiques Trade Gazette websites, including the-saleroom.com, and given them a five-star rating.

RUPERT Toovey is standing down as chairman of the RICS Art and Antiques faculty in order to train as a worker priest in the Church of England.

As collectors parted with hundreds of thousands of pounds for works at Frieze, fair organiser Jasper Joffe was busy at another event giving art away free.

The Art Fund has announced a new funding initiative in partnership with the Crafts Council, dubbed Art Fund Collect, aimed at challenging curators to be more ambitious in extending their collections at a quality craft fair.

Whitfield Fine Art pull out as Salander-O’Reilly’s multi-million dollar legal problems escalate

Not all the major single-owner collections are sold at auction. Last week Partridge Fine Art announced exclusively to ATG that they have secured the $40m (£20m) collection of Texas media and communications entrepreneur Scott Ginsburg for sale in their New Bond Street galleries.

THERE must be something satisfying about a sale that performs as expected. Vendor, auctioneer and buyers all have their hopes and desires affirmed and most people come away happy.

THE French government are so concerned about their dwindling share of the global art market that they have come up with a four-point plan to rescue it. They include a measure that effectively calls for the scrapping of due diligence for auctioneers.

£10,000 reward put up as police reveal that painting could hold the key to unsolved mystery

Investors in art and antiques will be among the winners of a major reform of capital gains tax proposed in the government’s pre-Budget report.

Another imperial Chinese sleeper has awoken in West Sussex.

When first unveiled at the International Exhibition in London in 1862 (and subsequently shipped to Paris in 1867 and Vienna in 1873), the St James’s Clock, as it became known, was heralded as the second largest clock in the world after E.J. Dent’s Big Ben.

Two January fairs run by Stella Show Management in New York are under threat from construction problems and the occupation of an armory building by the National Guard.

Tamlyns’ sale held in Bridgwater on October 2 included this unusual copper food mould in the form of a hedgehog, standing 7in (17cm) high.

FOUR men, including two lawyers, arrested in a police raid in Glasgow to recover the Leonardo da Vinci stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, have now been charged in a Scottish court.

Bonhams have announced a series of senior management changes for their European operations. They include the appointment of former deputy chairman Matthew Girling in the new role of Bonhams CEO Europe.