Auctioneers

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.

Austria: This broken pane of glass formed a haunting reminder of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which precipitated World War I.

THE bulk of the 208-lot Irish sale held at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5% buyer’s premium) on May 17 was middle-to-low range material from the studio of the late painter, socialite and friend of the Prince of Wales Derek Hill (1916-2000) but it produced the busiest saleroom expert-in-charge William Porter had seen for a picture sale.

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.

UK: THE Internet has, so far, hardly lived up to the initial claims made for it in the auctioneering world, but it does have its merits, as the Staffordshire firm Wintertons will attest.

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.

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

A classic entry in Christie's South Kensington's Classic Arts and Crafts sale on May 2 provided one of the day’s top results – £6800 for this pair of 2ft x 12in (61 x 31cm) c.1900 stained glass panels decorated with mediaeval landscapes and a text inscription.

OPENING up the auction scene to a wider audience has long been the aim of many involved in the business. Leading provincial auctioneers Dreweatt Neate are continuing to do their bit with a new series of saleroom talks aimed at the uninitiated.

UK: A striking amalgam of European form and Oriental decoration, this Meissen derived Kakiemon tankard was a rare hybrid, apparently one of only four in public record, and it consequently attracted worldwide interest at Woolley and Wallis’s sale in Salisbury on May 23.

It may look like a cross between an ancient rolodex and a tinpot bandstand but this is actually a rather stylish piece of late Victorian heavy industrial equipment.

OPENING up the auction scene to a wider audience has long been the aim of many involved in the business. Leading provincial auctioneers Dreweatt Neate are continuing to do their bit with a new series of saleroom talks aimed at the uninitiated.

Pewter is seldom seen in large quantities these days but Phillips’ Chester May 4 sale turned the clock back to the ’70s with an array of more than 100 lots.

UK: At over 300 lots, Christie's South Kensington’s modern design auction on May 16 was a large and wide ranging gathering, (it would have been even larger had the auctioneers not withdrawn a 17-lot collection of Italian glass).

UK: Somehow it still happens. After all the years of the Roadshow and other TV programmes on antiques, all the glossy magazine articles and all the newspaper columns, people still junk what seem obviously valuable materials, like this set of three Victorian stained glass panels.

USA: INCUNABULA offered as part of the April 26 sale of Early Printed Books at Swanns were not in the Friedlaender class, but the top lots did include two books from the press of Gunther Zainer, Augsburg’s first printer.

JUST two days after moving operations to new premises at Coleridge House, Shaddongate, Carlisle, the recently retitled firm Thomson Roddick & Medcalf celebrated with a special book sale and took a bid of £17,500 for one of the privately printed subscriber copies of Seven Pillars of Wisdom issued in 1926.

UK: This sixth-plate image of the Japanese sailor Sentaro, nicknamed Sam Patch, was a top priced entry in a successful section of early Daguerreotypes offered at Christie’s South Kensington on May 11.

UK: London and Cotswold dealers secured the lion’s share of the top lots at Holloways’ antique sale in Banbury on April 25.

Devon auctioneers’ Rendells mammoth 2000-lot sale saw keen interest and strong prices for a selection of horological pieces.