Chiswick Auctions

Topping a number of good pre-Christmas clock sales was a rare table/bracket clock, among the last made by London ‘Golden Age’ name Daniel Quare (1649-1724) with Stephen Horseman, who became his partner at the Exchange Alley workshop in 1721.

Dated 1536 and printed in Antwerp, a defective copy of what is known as the ‘mole’ edition of Tyndale’s Newe Testament – so called from the mole (or perhaps hedgehog) depicted on a stone on which St Paul’s foot is resting in one of the many woodcut illustrations – made £30,000 in a recent London sale.

Sold for £1900 in a recent London sale was an 1892 first of Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency – a record for this particular work.

Earlier this year, the Paris auction house Artcurial sold an exceptional collection of Impressionist and Cubist works by the influential Czech avant-garde artist Otakar Kubin (1883-1969).

Headlines about antiquities today usually follow two paths: either highlighting the issue of looting or focusing on the huge sums treasures of the ancient world can command.

If bidders were to be lured to the ageless aspect of antiquities, one might think that a lamp which first lit the darkness two millennia ago would be hard to resist.

Figurative art was the other big seller in early September, led by the waxwork of Medardo Rosso’s sculpture Bambina Ridente (see last week’s News pages) which topped a successful week of sales at Chiswick Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) when it more than doubled the top estimate at £180,000.

Chiswick Auctions’ hiring spree has continued with 12 new starters joining this summer, taking the firm to a headcount of 80.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Ahead of its season-opening September 18 jewellery sale, Chiswick Auctions invited Jessica Diamond, the suitably-named jewellery editor for 'Condé Nast Traveller', to pick her top 10 lots from the catalogue.

A selection of fine or unusual bindings seen at auction during the summer months will feature more prominently in a future issue, but shown here is a 1751 first of Thomas Gray’s An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard in a striking later binding that was among lots offered at Chiswick Auctions (25/12% buyer’s premium) on July 12.

Ivory frames to this 18th century wooden box, below, with tortoiseshell panels, did nothing to hold back bidding on currently hugely popular Indo-Portuguese material.