1. Italian brass floor lamp
The Evolution sale at Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst on November 19 includes a 4ft 10in (1.47m) nine leaf brass floor lamp by Italian post-war designer Tommaso Barbi, c.1970.
Barbi produced many similar works that combined functionality with inspiration from the natural world, with this Rabarbaro (rhubarb leaf) lamp among his signature works. Estimate £5000-8000.
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2. First-edition Batchelor’s book
This 10-page tract on the theme of ‘none but fools marry’ is titled This Married Man’s Answer (The) to the Batchelor’s Estimate of the Expences of a Married Life. A first-edition copy of a rare work in any state, it was written by Edward Ward and printed for T Payne, London, 1729.
Estimate £600-800 at Forum Auctions in London on November 21.
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3. Rare sampler
A girl from the Queen’s Orphan School in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1838 completed this rare sampler.
The orphanage was established in 1833 to house orphans, neglected children and the children of convicts transported from Europe to horrors of the formidable penal colony. It was described in a newspaper article at the time as ‘cold and comfortless’. The writer goes on to elaborate ‘…never did we see two hundred human beings, that exhibited so squalid an appearance, as did the majority of the Queen’s orphans’.
Belying such a bleak situation is the colourful and carefully stitched sampler, which contains a verse Lines on a Lady, extolling the virtues of meekness and mildness and wishes may she in paths of flowers stray. The sampler, which was worked with the name of the orphanage, is on offer with an estimate of £600-800 at Tennants’ Costume, Accessories & Textiles sale in Leyburn on November 22. View Tennants auctions online via thesaleroom.com.
4. Tripod table
The mother-of-pearl and wire inlay on this very British form of tripod table above suggests it may have been a specific commission. The use of star and crescent inlay is similar to that seen on Turkish firearms and hints at a possible Ottoman origin.
It comes for sale by descent from William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace, who was secretary to Lord Nugent, commissioner of the Ionian Islands, prior to 1833. While there, he travelled extensively, meeting Mehemet Ali, Pasha of Egypt.
As part of the Lyon & Turnbull sale in Edinburgh on November 20 titled Five Centuries: Furniture, Paintings & Works of Art, the estimate is £3000-5000.
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5. Rediscovered Paul Nash picture
Leaving the Trenches, a rediscovered First World War pastel, watercolour and ink sketch by Paul Nash (1889-1946), is estimated at £50,000-70,000 at Bonhams’ Modern British and Irish Art sale in London on November 20.
It is one of a batch of drawings depicting life at the Western Front which Nash – invalided out after just two months at the Ypres Salient – exhibited at The Goupil Gallery in London in May 1917. Their freshness and sense of realism made an immediate impact on a public starved of images of the conflict and prompted the Ministry of Information to appoint Nash as an official war artist.
The 8 x 10in (20 x 25cm) drawing was formerly in the collection of Alan Proctor (1920-2009), an engineer at Jaguar who formed a diverse art collection in the 1960s, and has been consigned from his family.