Auctioneers

FELLOWS and Sons, the Birmingham auctioneers, have refunded the buyers of three watercolours sold as the work of Prince Charles last week after the pictures were revealed as forgeries.

MUSIC makers, from Jaques Frères musical boxes to Würlitzer juke boxes, make their sometimes surprising mark at auction but although this German orchestrion, right was one of the most unusual pieces to come up at any English rooms, Market Harborough auctioneers Gildings (12.5% buyer’s premium) recognised it as a major money maker in their May 28 sale.

IRISH auctioneers have long been adamant that Irish pictures sell better in Ireland and certainly the 71 per cent sold by lot achieved at James Adam (15% buyer’s premium) in Dublin on May 29 was only just shy of the 76 per cent by lot selling rate taken at Christie’s Irish sale in London on May 17.

Back on April 9 and 10 Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) Bond Street rooms offered a double helping of portrait miniatures on consecutive days: a 165-lot single owner and a 133-lot mixed-vendor sale, both of which saw around three-quarters of their contents get away.

On the same day that Christie’s King Street rooms were offering pieces from the upper-crust end of the portrait miniatures and vertu market, their South Kensington (17/510% buyer’s premium) rooms had a more bread-and-butter selection of the same material.

A new auction record for any antiquity was set at Christie’s last week on June 13 when the 5ft 3in (1.6m) high ancient Roman marble statue of Venus, pictured right, sold for £7.2m.

Predating Shackleton’s famous experiments in polar printing by nearly 60 years, this is one of a group of six playbills printed in the Arctic in 1851-52, during the voyages of the Resolute and Intrepid in search of Sir John Franklin.

Jean Goulden (1878-1947) was another name restored to pre-eminence at the Tajan sale on 28 May. Goulden belonged to the Groupe Dunand–Goulden–Jouve–Schmied and himself underwrote the exhibitions the group staged annually at the Galerie Georges-Petit in Paris from 1921 to 1933.

THE Hôtel Drouot, traditional home of Parisian auctions, will not now be sold, it has been announced. Following the withdrawal of all four bids after none could surmount difficulties in negotiating a sale, the auctioneers who own the Drouot have raised €71m (approx £45m) and set up a management company, Drouot Holding, to run it – although not its finances – with seven of their number on the board.

William Blake did not manage to persuade his non-conformist followers to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, but a Victorian carpenter came close with this davenport, right. Consigned to the May 22-23 sale held at Winterton’s (10% buyer’s premium) in Lichfield, the davenport belongs to an interesting group of 19th century olivewood furniture bearing the logo Jerusalem, written in English or Hebrew.

Nanking means to most people the rape of that city by the Japanese; to ceramics collectors it conjures up memories of the Nanking Cargo, but in the specialist picture market it is the place where the 1842 treaty was signed opening up five ports to British merchants “without (molestation or restraint”.

The German painter Hans Purrmann (1880-1966) is described by Bénézit as an artist who was heavily influenced by Matisse (with whom he had contact in Paris from 1906-1914), but who lacked the greater artist’s “sense de lumière et de la couleur”.

If maritime artefacts are your thing, set sail for Christie’s South Kensington. There’s a positive marina’s worth of material on offer on June 19 in the first of their two annual sales held in London devoted to all manner of marine artefacts and paintings.

Marcel Breuer is one of the major names in furniture associated with the Bauhaus design school. When examples of his distinctive take on modernist furniture design come up for auction they regularly make substantial sums, but it is rare for an entire collection to find its way under the hammer especially a collection of specially commissioned pieces from a named provenance.

This rare Elizabethan oak draw leaf refectory table proved to be the chief atttraction at the sale of the late Clive Sherwood’s Collection offered by Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on May 22, when it sold for a mid-estimate £55,000 to a London dealer.

This portrait miniature of a 30-year-old lady by Nicholas Hilliard, dated 1582, set a new auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s Olympia rooms on June 6 when it sold to a private collector bidding on the phone against the room for £200,000 (plus premium).

THE National Library of Ireland has acquired a sprawling collection of manuscripts by James Joyce, which remained hidden for nearly 60 years after being concealed from the Nazis.They include a total of some 700 pages in six notebooks, 16 drafts from Ulysses and typescripts and proofs of Finnegans Wake.

A VENDOR has been ordered to pay more than £10,000 legal costs after a picture he sold at auction proved not to be by the famous German artist to whom it was attributed.

ALFRED Taubman, who has just announced an appeal against his collusion conviction, has started the ball rolling in his bid to sell his controlling stake in Sotheby’s.

TILES: Tiles seem to be the new hot collecting area in British decorative ceramics. Following on from a sellout exhibition at Richard Dennis’s shop in Kensington last year, Bonhams held a sale of ceramic design in January that featured a large collection of De Morgan tiles which were pursued by a determined band of private collectors to prices that rivalled those of the pottery’s striking hollowwares.