Tennants

THE best seller at Tennants’ sale on November 22-23 in the Yorkshire Dales was consigned by a Yorkshire family with connections to the famous silversmith who made it.

THE Top lot in this North Yorkshire sale at Tennants on 18 October appeared very early on in the proceedings, when, as part of the opening art and architecture section of the sale, a copy of Humphrey Repton’s Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening was sold for £6000.

There are some who think that the people who collect the cat paintings of Louis Wain (1860-1939) are as mentally unbalanced as the artistic imagination that created them, but there is no gainsaying the extraordinary prices that Wain continues to fetch in the salerooms.

There was the familiar wide mix and flash of quality at this Dales auctioneers’ weekly sale, where the top price came from a piece over the Pennines – an 18th century yew wood dresser base that had originally graced a pub in Blackpool.

UK: TURNOVER figures posted by provincial auctioneers for the year January to December 1999 revealed a turnaround in the positions of the top two firms.