Auctioneers

UK: TOPPING Christie’s June 14 English furniture sale at £420,000 was this pair of marble-topped side tables attributed to the Cobb and Vile partnership.

UK: THIS 191/2in (49cm) wide engraved ivory-inlaid kingwood and boxwood dressing table casket is one of just six known pieces signed by the Italian royal cabinetmaker Pietro Piffetti.

UK: CERAMICS took the top spots at this 1650-lot Cotswolds sale in the form of a pair of mid-19th century Continental majolica stick stands.

UK: MEDALS took the top three slots in this toys, juvenilia and ephemera sale but there was a healthy take-up for toys from collectors and from a couple of Liverpool-based specialist dealers at this 537-lot auction that netted Biddle & Webb around £25,000.

UK: ONE of numerous full-page woodcut illustrations of bridles, bits, etc. to be found in a 1602 Naples first of Piero Antonio Ferraro’s Cavallo Frenato..., bound in contemporary limp vellum, that sold at £1950 (Traylen) in the Dominic Winter, Swindon (buyer's premium 12.5 per cent) sale.

UK: EARLY German drinking vessels captured all the attention and big money in Christie’s June 13 sale of silver.

UK: AS EVEN the upper echelons of the trade cannot afford to stick to academic standards at the expense of turning a profit in the market for the purely decorative, one finds increasingly serious sums of money paid out for amusing trifles of zero antiquity, such as a large pair of 20th century Continental jardinières, one of which is shown here.

UK: ONE of only three in existence, this Sir Stanley Matthews Royal Doulton Character jug shocked all in attendance at Louis Taylor in Stoke-in-Trent on June 11.

CHRISTIE’S are preparing to sell all subsidiary companies currently operating under the Spink name. PricewaterhouseCooper have been instructed to handle the disposal of their Spink assets, which are likely to fall into four separate entities.

UK: A RARE example of Irish printing, this work by Hugh MacCaghwell, styled Aodh mac aingil, translates as A Mirror of the Sacrament of Penance and was printed at the Irish Franciscan College of St. Anthony of Padua at Louvain in 1618.

UK: ILLUSTRATED here are two items used to decorate the covers of the sale catalogue issued for by Dominic Winter for their May 17 Sports sale.

A Passion for Pottery... Further Selections from the Henry H. Weldon Collection by Peter Williams and Pat Halfpenny, published by Sotheby’s Publications ISBN 0962258865, £225, hb in slipcase (limited edition of 1500 copies).

AUSTRALIA: A COLLECTION of classic 18th century English and German porcelain gave a flying start to Christie’s Australia’s (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) mammoth 575-lot, mixed-owner auction of Decorative Arts in Melbourne on May 28-29.

UK: Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) have been making something of a habit recently of successfully selling highly elaborate inlaid marble Italian table tops.

UK: This 3ft 81/2in (1.13m) wide giltwood settee of antique inspiration, based on a design in Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration of 1807, went under the hammer at Gorringes’ sale in Lewes on June 6.

UK: THE penultimate Doulton outing held by Phillips (15/10% buyer’s premium) on March 27 was the 263-lot offering of prototype figures from the Doulton archives, an event which proved highly successful for both auctioneer and vendor being a near sellout and almost doubling predictions at £425,570.

If Hogarth had lived a little longer he might have bumped into the bibulous individual responsible for commissioning this c.1770 ale glass.With a capacity of nearly two pints, it is one of the largest of its kind on record. Drink the full measure, and the 14-ply spiral band in the opaque twist stem might begin to do just that, because ale in the 18th century was mighty strong compared to the milds and bitters of today.

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.

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.

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.