Sotheby's

EC fine Sotheby’s £13m – Christie’s escape penalty: THE US courts have given the go-ahead for compensation settlements to be paid in Sotheby’s and Christie’s $512m price fixing case. The green light came last week after the 90-day appeal period set by the US Supreme Court expired with no challenge to the ruling.

Few historic characters are guaranteed to generate more interest than the one-armed, one-eyed figure of Britain’s most celebrated admiral, Lord Nelson. Sotheby’s (19.5/10% buyer’s premium), Bond Street, 93-lot auction of Nelson memorabilia from the Alexander Davison collection sold on Trafalgar Day (October 21) to a room so packed that buyers had to spill over into an adjacent gallery.

THERE were cows aplenty, but only one beef, at Sotheby’s Olympia on Thursday night, when 60 bovine belles did their bit for charity. The high-profile heifers, whom you may have seen grazing the streets of London through the summer, were the first tranche of the Cow Parade sale – another 90 are due to be offered soon on the Internet.

Sotheby’s break mould in bid to lure Germans: A little piece of history was made on October 8 and 9 when Sotheby’s four-part dispersal of the Beck Collection of 20th Century German and Austrian art became the first major sale ever to be conducted in euros in a London auction room.

The extensive press coverage given over to the conflict in Afghanistan may have helped re-focus collectors’ attentions on the magnificent Gandharan sculpture produced in this troubled region in the second and third centuries AD.

After the spectacular HK$37m (£3,394,495) price bid for the Yongzheng (1723-35) peach vase in Sotheby’s Hong Kong May 7 sale, their New York rooms had high hopes for this yellow ground famille rose double gourd vase, Qianlong period (1736-95), consigned by the same private US vendor, in their Chinese outing on September 19. They were not disappointed by the outcome.

Clocks, Watches and Wristwatches: There was a solid performance for the 288 lots of Clocks, Watches and Wristwatches offered by Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on September 19 marred only by the failure of the potential best seller, the 18th century English musical and automaton clock attributed to James Cox, London.c.1775.

With the antiquities market suffering from high prices and criminal scandals and a shortage of good material, it is no real surprise that collectors have turned to natural, as opposed to man-made, artefacts of greater age and, arguably, equal beauty.

THE Italian painter Pietro Annigoni (1910-1988) is forever associated in English minds with his dramatic 1955 portrait of The Queen, which now hangs in The National Portrait Gallery and which still has plenty of admirers, including HM herself.

With the government still dithering over whether and when it should put a bill banning hunting with dogs in England to the vote in the House of Commons, it could hardly be a more ironic time for Sotheby's to be auctioning the only known portrait of the 'Father of Foxhunting' and the founder and first Master of the Quorn Hunt.

WHEN Tom Crowther founded Crowther of Syon Lodge dealing in antique chimneypieces in 1876, the prevailing design trends were moving from Gothic Revival to Aesthetic, and over the next 125 years the Middlesex firm have serviced every subsequent design trend.

Les Ecosses have always had a certain cachet in France and it was the Parisian jewellers Chaumet who, in the 1950s, made this brooch, right, in the form of bagpipes, the naturally dimpled baroque pearl used imaginatively as the bag, the pipes adorned by single cut diamonds and turquoise stones. At Sotheby’s Gleneagles sale it sold to a Scottish private bidder at £4000.

Dutch designer and architect Anne Paul Brinkman is a well known name in interior decorating circles. He opened his first Antiek Curiosa shop in 1972 at the tender age of 15 and over the next 30 years established himself as the creator of what he terms Gesamtkunstwerke – total interiors combining architecture, antique and modern works of art with a sympathy for the original surroundings.

A presentation set of The Writings of Mark Twain offered as part of the Sotheby’s New York sale of June 18, a 1903 ‘Hillcrest’ edition, lacked one of the 23 volumes and some of the spines and labels were darkened.

This large Highland hunting landscape by John Frederick Herring Senior proved to be the highlight of Sotheby’s annual auction series held last week at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, when it sold for £470,000 (plus 19.5/10% premium) to London dealer Richard Green Fine Art bidding on the phone.

The extraordinary prices realised for football memorabilia such as the £140,000 bid at Christie’s South Kensington for Pele’s Brazilian 1970 World Cup Final shirt reflect sporting collectors’ current obsession with the beautiful game.

This muscular terracotta modellino of a moor, Il Moro, 2ft 75/8in high (80.5cm), attributed to Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), wrested the top slot from a powerfully modelled pair of 16th century bronzes in Sotheby’s (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) 174-lot European Sculpture and Works of Art 900-1900 auction on July 9.

The schwein-degen, or boar sword, is a rare beast. Good examples can elude collectors for decades, and the cobwebbed halls of schloss- dwelling aristocrats are a favourite hiding place. So there was plenty of excitement when an example broke cover at Sotheby’s sale of arms and armour in London on July 10.

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.