Auctioneers

With most English furniture still underperforming at auction, it is French 19th century cabinetmaking that is providing the soundest base of furniture sales in England.

The script for the very first Doctor Who episode owned by the first actor to play the role is coming up at auction in the West Midlands.

“We were particularly encouraged by the performance of the furniture with many pieces selling to trade and private buyers for ‘old school’ prices.”

An album of Indian photographs sold for £32,000 in Edinburgh provided ATG’s Pick of the Week in the previous issue (No 2331), but there was much more on offer in that 550-lot Scottish sale.

A single-owner collection of Tri-ang and other British toys will go under the hammer in what has been described as the largest of its type to come to auction.

Commonly known as a What The Butler Saw machine, a late 19th-early 20th century Mutoscope was the most alluring of a consignment of a collection of amusement arcade machines offered at Canterbury Auction Galleries (20% buyer’s premium).

Sold for $28,000 (£20,820) by Christie’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on December 5 was this original drawing by Ralph Steadman for the 1971 first appearance of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Running to some 300pp and described by the auctioneers as “a most enchanting album, redolent of Jane Austen and her world”, a scrapbook compilation of paper cut-outs, views and figural studies, sold for £1550 in a general sale held in Sussex.

Works by Pablo Picasso (1881- 1973) dominated the latest series of Impressionist and Modern art auctions in London, with Gurr Johns securing nearly all of them.

A Parisian Book of Hours dating to c.1440-50 was among illuminated or decorated manuscripts sold during in the closing weeks of 2017.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

With options to sell at regular intervals in North America, Europe, Hong Kong or China, the major auction houses and their vendors take a global view of the Asian art market.

Private sales and Asian buyers helped Sotheby’s report a 12% jump in sales last year to $5.5bn (£4bn).

As well as the ‘big three’, a clutch of other US salerooms will be holding specialist Asian art sales in mid March.

Outselling much of the sort of furniture its owner could have worked on, an 18th century carpenter’s oak tool chest on stand was among the pleasant surprises for vendors at the opening sale of the year at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium).

The Buckinghamshire countryside, with its rolling hills, fields, hedgerows and trees, inspired much of the art of John Nash (1893-1977), the younger and less well-known brother of Paul Nash.

A portrait thought to depict one of the most notorious characters of the Jacobean age drew strong bidding in Canterbury.