Auctioneers

SOTHEBY’S Bond Street (20/12% buyer’s premium) took their first tentative step into the world of 20th century Asian art on May 6 with a 173-lot mixed-owner dispersal of Chinese, Japanese and Korean paintings, prints, posters, sculpture and ceramics on May 6.

For 30 years, the props that have given authenticity to many of viewers’ beloved TV and movie costume dramas, have been supplied by West London specialists Period Props & Lighting.

IF you’ve walked through the glazed doors at Bonhams in Bond Street in the last month, you can’t have failed to notice the major effects of the six-month facelift to the premises. The international headquarters are now up and running with only a few finishing touches left to be made.

CHRISTIE’S have announced that as well as appointing Old Master dealers Hall and Knight as international directors, they have also acquired the firm’s New York galleries.

MANY of the top lots among the 725 offered at Clarke Gammon Wellers' (15% buyer's premium) April 20 sale came from the owner of an elegant local flat – including a William IV mahogany longcase.

THE West Midlands auctioneers Fieldings (12.5% buyer’s premium) are making something of a habit of getting impressive prices for market-fresh watercolours by the Newlyn School painter Walter Langley (1852-1922).

Auctioneer Richard Bromell of Charterhouse Auctions (15% buyer’s premium), Sherborne had listened with reserved interest to a client who described a gilt blue glass decanter in his possession “almost identical” to a pair catalogued as in the manner of James Giles c.1770 that had featured in a 1968 edition of Country Life.

IN Amsterdam, if you pay close attention to the silver sales, you occasionally find a British-made object tucked away beneath the massing foliage of prized Dutch cutlery and tableware. It normally sits quietly, not causing much of a stir.

THE market’s mood for the earliest English porcelain was in evidence at the April 27 sale held by Brettells (12% buyer’s premium) of Newport. The Shropshire firm offered a 16-lot private collection of mainly Worcester wares.

DESPITE the well-documented vagaries of the silver and electroplate market, if vendors can forget the price history of the previous two decades it is still possible to hold a successful sale of country house tablewares.

GIVEN the bob-a-long prices for run-of-the-mill furniture at auction, the fact that 917 offerings at Lawrences of Bletchingley's (12.5% buyer's premium) 2861-lot April 27-29 sale were furniture didn’t bode well for the three-day outing.

FOLLOWING relegation, the on-running saga of Leeds United’s finances no doubt will mean that the club will end up selling more of their players over the summer. However, spare a thought for Crouch End Vampires F.C., one of the longest established amateur football clubs, that literally ended up selling the family silver at Bonhams Bath (17.5% buyer premium) back on March 15.

LONG before Heineken, Allsopp & Sons’ Burton ale had a claim to be the beer which reached the parts other beers could not reach – bottles of it accompanied Sir George Strong Nares’ expedition attempting to reach the South Pole in 1875.

EXPECTED to sell for £1m or more at Sotheby’s on June 22 is the Macclesfield Psalter, an unrecorded illuminated manuscript, made in England in the early 14th century, that came to light only when the saleroom was asked to sell the contents of the 18th century library of the Earls of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle.

A children’s and illustrated sale held by Pacific Book Auctions of San Francisco on May 13 included a collection of Oz books by L. Frank Baum.

CONDITION is nine-tenths of the law in toy collecting and that explains the remarkable level of interest in this No.2 Special Pullman train set, pictured right, which turned up at Bonhams Edinburgh (17.5% buyer premium) on March 25.

AN April 29 sale held by Bloomsbury Auctions presented an enormous selection of children’s, illustrated and private press books that ran to nearly 900 lots. While there was much to admire in the other sections of the sale, I shall concentrate on the children’s books for this report. A great many of the lots came from one fine collection in which many of the books contained a bookplate designed by Pauline Baynes.

WITH London’s Master Drawings week looming in July, specialist dealers were predictably out in force to contest this long-lost François Boucher (1703-1770) drawing which re-emerged at the Oxford rooms of Mallams (15% buyer’s premium) on May 7.

“The best example I have seen in the last ten years,” said Woolley and Wallis’ decorative arts specialist Michael Jeffery, of this Martinware bird, which was consigned to the auctioneers’ May 26 sale from a vendor in the New Forest.

WILD beasts, and tigers in particular, loomed large in the late Georgian imagination. They appear in a range of guises, from the fearful symmetry of William Blake’s Tyger to the almost cuddly features of the big cats modelled by Staffordshire potters for popular consumption.