News

SOTHEBY’S have announced that they will hold their first sale at their new Olympia salerooms on September 18. The dispersal of the single owner collection will mark the beginning of an annual programme of 80-85 sales aimed largely at the middle market in terms of value.

THE bulk of the 208-lot Irish sale held at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5% buyer’s premium) on May 17 was middle-to-low range material from the studio of the late painter, socialite and friend of the Prince of Wales Derek Hill (1916-2000) but it produced the busiest saleroom expert-in-charge William Porter had seen for a picture sale.

FRANCE: This early 18th century, barrel-shaped vinaigrier in blue-and-white Rouen grand feu faïence (c.1700), pictured, used for vinegar made from wine or cider, was the most eye-catching offering in the Louviers saleroom of Prunier on May 13.

Austria: This broken pane of glass formed a haunting reminder of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which precipitated World War I.

Apart from a few isolated surprises for cult rarities, Sotheby’s and Christie’s recent wine sales on both sides of the Atlantic bore out this sense of a market in a state of suspended animation.

UK: THE Internet has, so far, hardly lived up to the initial claims made for it in the auctioneering world, but it does have its merits, as the Staffordshire firm Wintertons will attest.

USA: Star turn at Sotheby’s May 15 Contemporary sale in New York was Jeff Koons’ outrageously kitsch ceramic sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles.