Sotheby's

UK: The highest and arguably most unexpected result in the 19th century section of Sotheby’s July 11 Works of Art sale came with the piece pictured here, a 3ft 7in (1.1m) high silvered statue of Galatea by Max Klinger which sold for £220,000. The subject is a characteristically symbolist work showing the sea nymph seated on a mottled grey marble throne carved with dolphins and is perhaps inspired by Gustave Doré’s painting shown at the 1880 Salon, and by Huysmann’s novel A Rebours.

UK: This article looks at a magnificent Book of Hours illustrated for one of the wealthiest prelates and patrons of the arts in 16th century Europe, Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg.

“Everyone’s looking over their shoulder and being careful not to overstock at the moment,” says Stephen Mould of Sotheby’s (10% buyer’s premium), whose June 27-28 single-owner sale of Finest and Rarest Wines The Great Collection nonetheless took £2.4m, the fourth highest total ever achieved for a single-owner wine sale.

BOUND in contemporary half morocco, one of 300 signed copies of the 1907 first edition of Rothschild’s Extinct Birds, containing 49, mostly chromo plates after Keulemans, Lodge, Grönvold, Smit and Frohawk, went at £3000 to a collector in the Sotheby’s sale of June 5.

Garden statuary is now an accepted part of the antiques market, but what about plants and trees? Auctioneers are prepared to sell anything that can remotely be classified as collectable these days, but there is a genuine case for admitting bonsai trees – works of art organic and antique – to the salerooms.

Illustrated is one of Lord Frederic Leighton’s most famous compositions Flaming June. This 41/2in by 41/4in colour sketch for the painting was understandably one of the sensations of Sotheby’s dispersal of the Leverhulme Collection at Thornton Manor, Merseyside, on June 26-28.

FRANCE: A trio of Paris summer high season auctions which Sothebys are staging jointly with Paris auctioneers Poulain Le Fur got off to a Fr64m (£6.2m) start last week with the sale of the contents of the Monaco apartment of the Italian collectors and dealers M et Mme Luigi Laura on June 27.

The London art market breathed a general sigh of relief last week after Sotheby’s and Christie’s Part I Impressionist and Modern sales belied the atmosphere of economic uncertainty with a clutch of high prices for classic works by the major names of late 19th and early 20th century art.

UK: FOLLOWING on from the success of the International section of the Seeger Collection in New York last month, high quality and low estimates once again proved a winning combination for Sotheby’s (20/15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) when on June 14 they offered works by British artists collected by Stanley Seeger over the last 20 or so years.

UK: ONE of the more interesting features of the last sale at Sotheby’s (10 per cent buyer’s premium) on May 2 and 3 was the collection of German medieval coins formed by Beat Konrad Graf Reuttner von Weyl (d. 1969). This dispersal is interesting on two counts.

UK: THIS Georgian chinoiserie framed mirror painting of c.1760 took the top slot at Sotheby’s June 13 English furniture sale when it sold to an American private buyer for £280,000.

There will be much more to come on the £2m Lewis Carroll’s Alice at Sotheby’s on June 6, but this week just one of ten recorded prints of Dodgson’s 1858 portrait of Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’, which sold for £160,000.

UK: THIS 191/2in (49cm) wide engraved ivory-inlaid kingwood and boxwood dressing table casket is one of just six known pieces signed by the Italian royal cabinetmaker Pietro Piffetti.

A Passion for Pottery... Further Selections from the Henry H. Weldon Collection by Peter Williams and Pat Halfpenny, published by Sotheby’s Publications ISBN 0962258865, £225, hb in slipcase (limited edition of 1500 copies).

UK: Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) have been making something of a habit recently of successfully selling highly elaborate inlaid marble Italian table tops.

SOTHEBY’S have announced that they will hold their first sale at their new Olympia salerooms on September 18. The dispersal of the single owner collection will mark the beginning of an annual programme of 80-85 sales aimed largely at the middle market in terms of value.

Apart from a few isolated surprises for cult rarities, Sotheby’s and Christie’s recent wine sales on both sides of the Atlantic bore out this sense of a market in a state of suspended animation.

USA: Star turn at Sotheby’s May 15 Contemporary sale in New York was Jeff Koons’ outrageously kitsch ceramic sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles.

UK: The Arcade series at Sotheby’s South (15/10% buyer’s premium) is where the lesser pieces that come into the Sussex rooms are offered, but there were some quality items among the 316 lots of Oriental ceramics and Eastern works of art of which 235 got away bringing a hammer total of £139,000 on April 11.

In the wake of the demise of Sotheby’s coin department, the good news is that one London auctioneer is making a comeback.