Sotheby's
Sotheby’s have been holding auctions since 1744. Founded in London, where they moved into salerooms on Bond Street in 1917, Sotheby’s expanded to New York in 1955 and now have salerooms and offices around the world.
Sotheby’s offer specialist sales in over 70 different categories though four major salerooms, six smaller ones and through their online bidding platform BIDnow.
Dates set as Sotheby’s specialists go it alone from Olympia rooms
06 April 2004DATES have been announced for the first collectors’ sales to be held at Sotheby’s Olympia by the company’s former in-house specialists, now working independently.
Man and Ape
01 April 2004Edward Tyson’s Orang-outang, sive homo sylvestris: Or, the anatomy of a pygmiecompared with that of a monkey, an ape, and a man... was the first work to demonstrate scientifically the structural relationships between man and anthropoid ape and one which had a powerful influence on subsequent thoughts on man’s place in nature – albeit the orang-outang on which his work was based was actually a young chimpanzee.
The problem of identifying bonafide Boningtons…
23 March 2004Illustrated in colour on the catalogue cover of Clevedon Salerooms’ March 4 sale was a watercolour described as being by Richard Parkes Bonington (1801-1828).
Rousseau’s Julie ‘Lettre XX1'
16 March 2004BOUND in red morocco gilt, an autograph draft manuscript of one of the more important letters that make up the narrative of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise – Lettre XXI, in which Saint-Preux writes about the women of Paris – was sold for €82,000 (£56,550) as part of the library of King Léopold III and Princess Lilian of Belgium at the Chateau d’Argenteuil near Waterloo. The sale was held by Sotheby’s Paris on December 11.
Moors banned, Armada planned
16 March 2004THE SPIRO collection, sold by Christie’s on December 3 included a few letters and documents of Spanish monarchs and a proclamation of July 1501, signed by both Ferdinand V and Isabella, that banned all unconverted Moors from Granada – the last step prior to the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain – was sold for £42,000.
Wittgenstein to Wittgenstein...
16 March 2004LETTERS from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to members of his family are rarely seen on the market, but one lot in a Sotheby’s sale of December 9 presented no fewer that 40 letters and postcards addressed to his pianist brother Paul, among them some of the earlier known letters in his hand and, naturally enough, containing much on the subject of music. This lot found a buyer at £42,000.
Sotheby’s bounce back as anti-trust shadow fades
16 March 2004SOTHEBY’S have just published their fourth quarter and year-end results for 2003, showing the company to be in a much better financial state than at the end of 2002.
A true romance worthy of Cervantes
09 March 2004SOLD at Sotheby’s (20% buyer’s premium) for £10,500 on December 9 was a copy in modern limp vellum of the Epigrammata of Joan Latinus, a work that praises John of Austria for his recent victory over the Turks at Lepanto.
Has the revival started?
02 March 2004Furniture activity in London has been fairly low-key so far this year, but two mid-February furniture sales not only looked a step above the rest but were also fairly similar in their scope. Christie’s South Kensington’s (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) 502-lot sale on February 11 was one of their five annual sales of more select, varied and decorative content.
Irish firsts: the word is heard and a “a terrible beauty is born”
26 February 2004The title page of Hugh Maccaghwell’s On the Sacrament of Penance which, printed at Louvain in 1618, is recognised as “the first original work by a living author in Irish”. The few works printed in Irish that preceded it were the Bible, liturgical texts or translations of the works of others, but this was one of five works produced in the years 1614-18 at a press operated by the Irish Franciscans at St. Anthony’s in Louvain – the first press to print and promote Irish writing in the vernacular.
Sotheby’s sell off real estate operation
23 February 2004Choosing to concentrate upon their auction business, Sotheby’s Holdings, Inc., have sold their real estate brokerage operations to Cendant Corporation. The total cash purchase price for the luxury brand and a 100-year licensing agreement was approximately $100m, plus ongoing fees based on future royalties from the development of a franchise business planned under the Sotheby's International Realty name.
Grayson Perry's 2ft 2in (66cm) high glazed earthenware vase makes £30,000
13 February 2004An unprecedented crowd of over 500 people turned up to watch, if not bid, at Sotheby’s near sell-out Part I auction of contemporary art on February 5. A stream of telephone bids created numerous eye-catching results, including new auction highs for Nicolas de Staël (£1.15m), Richard Hamilton (£100,000), R.B. Kitaj (£220,000), Paul Pfeiffer (£40,000) and last year’s Turner Prizewinner Grayson Perry (b.1960).
Sure signs of recovery at flagship sales
09 February 2004Contemporary art shines in London: The February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales in London gave plenty of evidence that the top end of the art market has made a strong recovery from last year’s bout of Iraq War syndrome.
Fabergé collection sold by private treaty
09 February 2004Sotheby’s announced last week that the Forbes Collection of Fabergé, which had been scheduled for sale at auction in New York in April, has been sold by private treaty to a prominent Russian industrialist.
Turkish table clock is toast of sale
06 February 2004Most Continental auctioneers combine clocks with their furniture sales, and Sotheby’s Amsterdam is alone in hosting the city’s only regular specialist clock and watch outing. These biannual specialist sales attract a mix of local and international dealers and in recent years Sotheby’s specialist Jos Meis has seen an increase in demand from US buyers for decorative French gilt mantel clocks and from Dutch collectors for the quality Dutch clocks in his sales.
The market responds to cautiously catalogued cameos
06 February 2004THE close of 2003 gave us much information on the current market in 18th-19th century cameos with more than 130 examples on offer between two European auction rooms, one in the UK, the other in Italy.
Clock sales tick over but achieve good selling rates
02 February 2004The pre-Christmas horological sales were lower key than those traditionally seen in the London rooms at this time of year. With the continuing problem of sourcing enough good material, few top names were on offer to tempt the serious collector, and the general mixed sales which resulted provided some good-value purchases for buyers further down the scale.
De Morgan out of storage
02 February 2004Whether your penchant is for Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco or later 20th century design, and whether you are looking for examples in ceramic, glass, metallic, furnishing or sculptural form, Sotheby’s Olympia’s first Decorative Arts sale of 2004 promises its usual broad mix.
The mouse roars in New York…
23 January 2004Even if the buying power of Americans is not so much in evidence in Europe in some quarters these days, they appear much less reluctant to flex their financial muscles in their own back yard. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to decorative arts.
Sotheby’s bet on Forbes and Whitney as guaranteed winners
23 January 2004Using the incentive of financial guarantees, Sotheby’s have secured two spectacular consignments for the New York spring auction calendar: the Forbes collection of Fabergé and pictures from the Whitney collection.
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