Auctioneers

To understand how European audiences viewed the Middle East in the 19th century, you could do worse than look at the body of work produced by Belgian artist Jan-Baptist Huysmans (1826-1906)*.

It has often been said that no other work of art encompasses the spirit of the Bauhaus more perfectly than Marianne Brandt’s tea-infuser or Teeextraktkännchen MT49, as it was officially called.

Around 200 lots of clocks and watches feature in a strong section as part of a four-day sale

The Art & Design post 1880 sale at Duke’s in Dorchester on April 25 included 44 lots of William De Morgan tiles consigned by descendants of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930), Earl of Balfour and prime minister from 1902-05. He is understood to have bought them directly from De Morgan in Fulham.

Roseberys’ managing director Vicki Wonfor has left the south London auction house after 15 years at the firm.

An auction of traditional European decorative arts at Sotheby’s New York (20/10% buyer’s premium) on April 16 included this New Zealand Arts & Crafts presentation casket.

Jeremy Knight, a book collector and the former curator of Horsham Museum and Art Gallery, believes he has purchased an artwork that is “the earliest-known illustration of a black person on an English sampler”.

The first auctions of the year at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) in Billingshurst – a live event on March 26 and a sealed bids sale on March 27 – included this pair of rare Portland stone groups of a nymph and satyr by Charles Sargeant Jagger (1885-1934).

Nelson and Napoleon are just two of the historical figures to have collecting markets devoted to themselves. Another is Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965).

The furniture highlight of Cheffins’ (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) latest Fine sale in Cambridge was the catalogue cover star.

Found in a country house in Gloucestershire, this letter written by Lord Byron (1788-1824) to Major John Cartwright (1740-1824) sold for £6000 at Chorley’s (28.2% buyer’s premium inc VAT) on March 20.

The stand-out performance in the March series of Asian art sales was a Qing monochrome clair-de-lune bottle vase offered by Freeman’s Hindman (26% buyer’s premium) in Chicago on March 24.

Turtle soup, which first became a delicacy on European tables with the emergence of the West Indies trade in the 18th century, was hugely popular among the elite of American society at the turn of the 20th century.