Auctioneers

UK: SEVEN telephone bidders swooped on this Victorian oak dining table, 6ft 6in by 3ft 7in (2.00 x 1.10m) offered with an estimate of £1800-2200 at Phillips Edinburgh on December 17.

UK: CHRISTIE'S, the world's highest-grossing auction house, have drawn up plans for a radical shake-up of its UK operations which could change the face of the London art and antiques trade.

UK: THE Scottish art market has been given a boost of confidence over the past few weeks by the strong performance of three sales in Edinburgh, that turned over £1.5m of antiques from Scottish sources.

UK: SILVER collectors could wait a long time for something so unusual to come onto the market.

THE Moor's Head Cup, a rare 17th century silver gilt sculptural marriage cup which topped Sotheby's sale of The Moritzburg Treasure from the Royal House of Saxony when it sold for £1.6m.

FRANCE: CHRISTIE’S France will start the new Millennium by relocating from Rue Paul-Baudry to new premises on Avenue Matignon, just off the Champs-Elysées and some 500 yards from Sotheby’s base on Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré.

UK: THE table was hotly contested by top London dealers at Ewbank’s rooms in Send, Surrey on December 9, 1999, with Fulham Road dealer Michael Lipitch emerging as the top bidder at £58,000.

UK: THE exceptional levels of demand recently seen for American pictures impacted on the London salerooms on the evening of December 14 when Bonhams achieved a record £1.4m for Richmond Hill in the Summer of 1862 by the Hudson River School painter Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900).

FRANCE: CHRISTIE’S will move into their new Paris headquarters at 9 Avenue Matignon at the centre of the art and antiques district of the 8th arrondissement on January 3.

The international market for Impressionist and Modern art saw further consolidation last week in London when Sotheby’s and Christie’s Part I and Part II sales turned over a combined total of £86.3m, some 45 per cent up on the £47.8m achieved at the equivalent sales last year.

UK: THE Professional Football Association was the successful bidder for L.S. Lowry’s crowd scene Going to the Match at Sotheby’s London last Wednesday, setting the record for the highest auction price for a Modern British painting at £1.75m

US: AT Christie’s East in New York on November 27, in a sale which reinforced 20th century design as a major market mover, this moulded plywood sculpture by Ray and Charles Eames, dated 1943 and 3ft 11/2in (95cm) high, established a world record price of $330,000 (£206,250) for the designers, selling to a specialist Eames collector.

UK: International bidders tuned into proceedings at Canterbury Auction Galleries on October 2, 1999 in the prospect of acquiring one of the earliest ship-to-shore receivers, illustrated right, manufactured in 1908 by the founding father of commercial radio communication – Guglielmo Marconi.

UK: CHRISTIE’S have denied rumours that they plan to give notices to quit to their gallery leaseholders in Ryder and Bury Streets, St James’s, so that they can redevelop the premises.

UK: PARIS salons were well known for flatulence in conversation. After each manned flight of giant balloons from the gardens of Versailles during the late 18th and 19th centuries, young men who wished to sound like scientists would earnestly debate whether hydrogen gas or hot air allowed the better flight.

UK: AN international mix of private collectors, dealers and institutions turned out to bid for an old and celebrated collection of European glass formed by the late Dr. Otto Dettmers of Bremen when it went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London last week on November 23.

WIDESPREAD rumours of the imminent takeover of London auctioneers Phillips were confirmed last week as Bernard Arnault’s luxury goods group Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH) paid a reported £70m for the whole of the Phillips Auction Group.

UK: IT MAY have been a mahogany wine cooler, but did its massive proportions and one-time residence in St Alban’s Cathedral suggest that it had formerly been used as a christening bath for babies rather than for beverages?

CHRISTIE'S International has had a radical rethink of its Internet strategy, disbanding its Internet Auctions division, which it created in May as a separate entity, and shelving plans to sell online.

UK: THE LINK between the woven silk portrait illustrated right and the modern world of computing may not be instantly apparent, but this 6in x 4in (16 x 11cm) silk panel, albeit a curiosity rather than a key scientific document, had a successful part to play in the Weinreb Computer Collection, which was sold by Bloomsbury Book Auctions in London on October 28.