Chiswick Auctions

A painting by Rex Whistler (1905-44) which was believed to be the last he painted before he was killed during the Second World War sold at Chiswick Auctions (25/12% buyer’s premium) in London.

Clocks from England’s ‘Golden Age’ provided highlights at two early December sales.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

The theme of death was of particular interest to the Italian industrialist Giancarlo Beltrame (1925-2011).

Well-provenanced Chinese works of art posted strong sums in what was a workmanlike, rather than spectacular, Asian art season for the leading regional auctioneers.

A selection of stand-out lots from auctions in west London, Mayfair and Gloucestershire.

The first Rolex Submariner was introduced to the public in 1954 at the Basel Watch Fair but it was Ian Fleming’s fictional spy, James Bond, who in 1962 transformed a reliable and rugged dive watch to a status symbol embodying suave masculinity and a sense of adventure.

Winter landscape. Early 20th century, possibly Russian or Scandinavian school, and ‘indistinctly signed’. That was lot 222, summed up in the catalogue at Chiswick Auctions (23% buyer’s premium) in London on October 3.

Sold for £1100 by Chiswick Auctions (23% buyer’s premium) on September 27 was a copy of the posthumously published, 1633 first of Henry Briggs’ Trigonometria britannica….

Lazarus Halstead, head of Asian art at Chiswick Auctions, describes this 33ft (10m) long handscroll as “both a work of art and an historical document”.

With everything buzzing at Chiswick Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) ahead of the opening of the South Kensington showroom next week (see last week’s ATG No 2305), life at the west London rooms goes on providing a solid base for this ambitious expansion.

Chiswick Auctions is to open its South Kensington showroom manned by a group of former Christie’s staff early next month.

The British Museum’s big summer exhibition on Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai is over, but more art from the Land of the Rising Sun is in the offing (also see International Events, ATG No 2305).

The Doccia factory is perhaps best known for its hard-paste sculptures – many of them near-direct copies in porcelain of 17th and early 18th century bronzes. The key figure is the talented modeller Gaspero Bruschi, himself a Florentine sculptor.

West London‘s Chiswick Auctions is to open a new showroom in South Kensington manned by at least eight former Christie’s staff.

A London street view by the northern English artist Harry Rutherford (1903-85) led the sale at Chiswick Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) on June 13.

Indian design was a prolific influence in Carlo Giuliano’s style. Already seen at the 1851 Great Exhibition, interest in technicolour jewellery from the sub-continent rose to new levels when Victoria became Empress of India in 1876.

Catalogued as ‘after the antique’, this marble figure of Aphrodite was the unexpected star of Chiswick Auctions’ June 14 sale of antiquities and tribal art in London.

“I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon”. Arguably the most famous words in archaeological history, they were supposedly uttered by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 as he unearthed a gold mask at Mycenae. Some 140 years later, portraits from antiquity remain powerful reminders of our ancient past.