Sotheby's

BUDDING interior designers will find no shortage of dates for the diary in the salerooms next month. On September 30 Sotheby’s Olympia launch their first in a new series of interior decorator sales with a multi-property selection featuring material billed as “of great visual impact to appeal to the professional designer and discerning collector alike”.

SOTHEBY’S chief executive Bill Ruprecht is bullish about the company’s second quarter performance, reporting a 25 per cent increase in net income on the same period last year.

AT a convivial press lunch at Sotheby’s last week, scribes and dealers mingled to officially welcome the fifth Asian Art in London celebrations, scheduled for November 7 to 15.

TOP LOT in this comparatively modest sale of Continental books and manuscripts at Sothebys on June 11, at £52,000 to a European dealer, was an autograph manuscript of one of Goethe’s more celebrated poems, Sehnsucht, (Longing) dated to c.1802-03.

This month has seen a crop of antique arms and armour offered in the London rooms with Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams all holding sales in July. Pictured here is the most expensive item of the summer series, a rare cased Colt belt revolver of c.1840, which made £200,000 at Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) sale in their Bond Street rooms on July 24.

A US federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of former Sotheby’s chairman A. Alfred Taubman who had been found guilty of conspiring with rival auctioneer Christie’s International to fix commission fees.

USA: Next week in an extraordinary single-lot auction – and the first joint sale between Sotheby’s.com and eBay, this 1933 Double Eagle $20 gold coin is to be offered for sale by Sotheby’s and New York coin auctioneer Stack’s on behalf of the US government.

SINCE the 1920s, Shell have commissioned paintings from key British artists for Shell county guides, calendars and school wall charts. In order to raise funds to create a new exhibition space in the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu for the earlier works from the company’s collection, Shell decided to sell 193 lots dating from 1950-1990, most of which had never been seen in public before, at Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5% buyer’s premium) on July 4.

UK: KNIGHT Frank, who are overseeing negotiations for the sale of Sotheby’s Billingshurt rooms, have set a deadline for interested parties of July 26.

WHILE trade buying was a feature of their capital’s main June important furniture sale, it was less evident earlier in the month at Sotheby’s (19.5/10% buyer’s premium), Bond Street, Croft Castle auction on June 6, that offered buyers a more middle range selection of English brown furniture from the Herefordshire estate of the late Lord Croft.

History was made at Sotheby’s July 10 Old Master Paintings sale when Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ long-lost masterpiece, The Massacre of the Innocents, sold in the room to the Mayfair-based book dealer Sam Fogg for £45m, the highest auction price ever achieved for a work of art in the UK.

Every picture tells a story, but in the case of Théodore Chassériau’s large portrait of Comtesse de Latour-Maubourg, it was condition as much as content that revealed the artist’s state of mind at the time.

Ever since Sotheby’s first Rock sale in 1981, Beatle material has been on a roll. Beatle memorabilia is the undisputed market leader in this field and this autographed copy of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album sleeve, 1967, received top billing at Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) 337-lot Rock/Fashion sale on June 14. This privately consigned entry was taken to £34,000 against a £6000-8000 estimate, by a private US buyer on the telephone.

Sotheby’s announcement of the discovery of a cache of Nelson memorabilia that has been hidden away for almost 200 years has generated huge media interest.

Searching for the perfect piece of passementerie or some furnishing fabric to add the finishing touch to an interior? It’s worth checking out Sotheby’s two-day sale from H.W. Keil Antiques which takes place in Cheltenham next week on July 15 and 16.

SOTHEBY’s lost one of their senior directors and serious innovators at the beginning of this month when Philippe Garner joined Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg with the position of Worldwide Director of Photographs and 20th and 21st Century Design.

Sotheby’s Olympia clinched the week’s loftiest price for an Asian work when a mighty £480,000 was placed by a Japanese telephone buyer probably bidding against the reserve for a complete set of Ando Hiroshige’s (1797-1858) 120 woodblock prints: The One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.

Concerns that turmoil in the world’s stock markets would spill over into London’s June round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales proved to be largely unfounded.

One of the more curious sections of Sotheby’s sale at Billingshurst on 21-22 May was devoted to natural, rather than man-made statuary.

Predating Shackleton’s famous experiments in polar printing by nearly 60 years, this is one of a group of six playbills printed in the Arctic in 1851-52, during the voyages of the Resolute and Intrepid in search of Sir John Franklin.