Auctioneers

Recent advertising highlights from UK sales and an Italian auction

An early version of virtual reality, the Victorian craze of stereoscopes is firmly in focus this summer

A Cornish saleroom offered over 300 enamel signs, advertising memorabilia, pump globes, vehicle mascots and collectables from a single-owner collection.

Victorian and Edwardian pottery butcher’s slabs made to display lard, butter and margarine are relatively frequent visitors to UK salerooms.

Looking more like a sale brochure when unopened, the embossed front cover shown below in fact conceals a rare 1906 stereoscopic viewer.

Just as stereoscope images became a Victorian collecting craze, another notable photographic fad of the era was the carte de visite

Previously unrecorded view by the Italian scenic painter now joins six others of Naples already known

A new auction record for the Wade factory was set by Potteries Auctions in Stoke-on-Trent when this monumental 3ft 10in (1.15m) high figure made for the 1951 Festival of Britain sold at £4200.

A fragmentary shabti with a cartouche for the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten proved a highlight of Bonhams’ latest Antiquities sale.

French auction business Drouot Group has sold a 30% stake to fund digital expansion.

It is 20 years ago that the auction record for Clarice Cliff was sent tumbling when an 18in (46cm) May Avenue charger sold for £34,000 at Christie’s South Kensington on May 14, 2003. Those were heady days indeed.

Among the most popular lots in the Guinevere: 60 Years on the King’s Road sale was this rare Italian marquetery, vellum and bronze sideboard.

Olympia Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) reported some significant overseas interest at its latest Fine Paintings, Works on Paper & Sculpture auction with almost a third of buyers from outside the UK.

Last month Sotheby’s announced it would be using the Dutch auction format – whereby the price starts high and is reduced until a buyer is found – for some sales of digital art, sparking a flurry of online media coverage. Its new Gen Art Program will start with an auction on July 26.

It’s no surprise that prices of Art Deco bronze and ivory figures have fallen sharply since US and UK laws on the sale of elephant ivory were tightened.

In the oeuvre of ‘primitive’ painter Bryan Pearce (1929-2006), still-lifes are significantly rarer than his marine and harbour scenes.

The SS Normandie was both the apogee and the nadir of the Art Deco movement.

International collectors invested considerable sums in the Expressionist paintings on offer at German sales over the last few weeks.