Auctioneers

From the day it was delivered to Lord Yarborough in 1826, this Benjamin Vulliamy travelling clock had remained in the same family until it was sold at Hy Duke’s sale in Dorchester on September 20.

One unexpected result enlivened an otherwise unexceptional sale of Continental decorative arts held by Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on September 13.

“One of their less distinguished sales. There were one or two decent things, but there was no heavyweight stuff...an example of too many auctions of marine things with not enough stock to go round.” Such was the assessment of one leading West End specialist dealer of Bonhams & Brooks (15/10% buyer’s premium) September 5 sale of Marine Works of Art.

ISAAC WARE’S Complete Body of Architecture, a calf bound 1768 edition illustrated, or rather “adorned” with engraved plates of “...plans and elevations from original designs... in which are interspersed some designs of Inigo Jones”, was one of a small group of architectural books that brought most of the higher bids in this Bearne's sale on 21 August.

A clutch of Oriental entries were among the more interesting works in the Amersham Auction Rooms’ otherwise run-of-the-mill offering of 324 antiques and collectables on 2 August.

Themed series are all the rage in the salerooms these days. September 25-28 has been designated Travel Week by Christie’s King Street rooms and will be given over to a series of sales devoted to voyages, exploration and discovery.

Pictured are two modern firsts, both in rather chipped jackets, from the book section of a September 7 sale held by Mallams of Oxford. P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred in Springtime of 1939 was sold for £100, while Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop of the previous year reached £210.

Sotheby’s annual jaunt north of the border to Gleneagles is as traditional to the Scottish leg of the ‘Season’ as the Oban ball and the first flexing of the Duke of Edinburgh’s trigger finger on the moors above Balmoral.

Good stock furniture attracted bidders to the first of these Staffordshire August sales on 15 August at Richard Wintertons, the best being a George III mahogany sofa table.

LONDON organisers Brian and Anna Haughton managed to clinch a deal with Sotheby’s late last week which will allow their New York flagship event, The International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show, to go ahead.

CHRISTOPHER Elwes, former managing director of Bonhams, and Indian art expert Patrick Bowring have broken new ground by opening India’s only specialist fine art auction house. They will hold their first sale in Delhi on November 5 and aim to create a network of offices to service the Indian market.

USA: Sotheby’s is likely to cease all sales at its branch in Chicago after November 1. Around 19 of the office’s 31 employees will lose their jobs as Sotheby’s closes the auction house they bought from Leslie Hindman in 1997 and reverts to running just a consignment office in the Midwest capital.

This pair of Minton plaques by pâte-sur-pâte master Louis Solon had been rescued by a Staffordshire man from his mother’s garage and transported by supermarket plastic bag to the Burton-on-Trent rooms of Richard Winterton.

FAIRLY routine furniture and modest pictures predictably took most of the higher prices at this Brightwells 850-lot sale in Herefordshire on 15-16 August but a couple of unusual items among the silver and the objets d’art were the eye-catchers.

FRANCE: Etude Tajan, France’s premier commissaires-priseurs, are to be known from now on as just plain TAJAN. The firm, run by Jacques Tajan and his son François, has been known as Etude Tajan since Jacques Tajan went independent from former partner Antoine Ader in 1995.

SPECIALIST collectors and dealers don’t seem to have a closed season, certainly not in the arms and armour world and they turned up in strength at Weller & Dufty in Birmingham on 25 July.

DAVID Lay’s trawls through Cornwall to mount regular sales like this 2000-lot marathon on 16-17 July usually throw up something special but here it was a case of piling ’em high and selling ’em reasonable.

THE two-day Staffordshire sale at Wintertons on 25-26 July was, at just under 800 lots, not perhaps quite a giant sale but it certainly covered the range of lower and middle-priced antiques.

ONE of the top lots in the Thomson Roddick & Medcalf sale of July 18 was a privately printed volume of 1890 containing works by Dante, illustrated by Phoebe Traquair and supplied with notes by J.S. Black.

After a quiet August Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) sprang into action in September with two sales packed into the afternoon of Monday the 4th: 321 lots of street fashion, accessories and other items of costume and 388 lots of vintage film posters.