Auctioneers

LONDON: Renaissance period combined scaphe dial and astrolabe made by Arsenius of Louvain, dated 1563.

Sotheby’s board of directors have approved payment of $256m to clients in the civil lawsuit which claimed collusion with Christie’s in setting charges for buyers in 1992 and sellers in 1995.

UK: The first celebrity house sale of the new millennium took place last week near Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire, where noted aesthete and furnisher to the stars Christopher Gibbs was clearing his Victorian manor house under the auspices of Christie’s.

UK: TOMMASO Zanzotto, chairman of Stocklight, which owns the Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books recently acquired Bloomsbury Book Auctions, has vowed to keep the two companies totally separate.

UK: WHATEVER the privations of life in the Soviet Union, one could still enjoy a simple game of chess. But because official art is turned to the use of propaganda in every dictatorship, so the more opulent chess sets in post-revolutionary Russia became a metaphor for the struggle between communists and capitalists.

US: TANGIBLE Asset Galleries, the Californian art and antiques auctioneers and dealers, have pulled out of the deal to acquire Gavelnet.com, the Internet and interactive TV auction company.

UK: Eighteen months after their £52m sale of works of art from the Austrian branch of the Rothschild dynasty, Christie’s have secured a further collection, this time from the French arm of the famous banking family and estimated to fetch over £15m.

UK: Loyal service brings its rewards, as this fine Queen Anne walnut bachelor’s chest, which sold at Anderson & Garland on Thursday, September 21, attests.

ACADEMY Auctioneers, London, have vowed to fulfil their commitments to existing clients, despite disputes over the sale of the company.

UK: Bonhams, the 200 year old family-owned British auction house and Brooks, the classic car and automobilia auctioneers, are to merge.

UK: English or Continental? That was the question specialist dealers and collectors were asking themselves of this mid-16th century brass candlestick which turned up at Sotheby’s oak sale at Billingshurst, Sussex on September 12 and 14

The combined hammer prices for pre-war B-movie advertising posters at auction houses these days can easily exceed the budgets allocated by the old Hollywood studios to such downmarket films.

USA: SKINNER’S auctioneers of Boston have set up a new contemporary art gallery which could do for American artists what Maurice Saatchi has done for Damien Hirst and others.

The William Foyle Library Pt. II sale at Christie’s, London last week revealed a copy of one of the rarest of all blockbooks.

While Thai and Chinese businessmen splashed out on bottles of Pomerol 61 and Romanee-Conti 85 in the years leading up to the crash of the Tiger economies in the late 1990s, Japanese captains of industry were impressing their corporate friends with equally expensive bottles of Scotch, which they would crack open after work and down in one sitting.

UK: The market for 20th century collectable ceramics can be a fickle beast – as quick to react to fashion as a high street shirt – so one should not necessarily be surprised to learn that, for once, Christie’s South Kensington (17.5 per cent buyer’s premium) found the temperature variable when they dipped their toes into these waters on August 25, 2000.

UK: CONFUSION has arisen over the future of Academy Auctions of Ealing after conflicting reports that it may or may not be closing.

Included among a fine selection of Scottish silver and vertu at the sale conducted by Sotheby’s at the Gleneagles Hotel, Perthshire, Scotland on August 29 was this remarkable royal presentation set of buttons painted with shooting, fishing and hunting scenes.

Country pursuits like shooting grouse and watching royals traditionally attract wealthy tourists to Scotland at the end of August, and auctioneers have long since taken advantage of this influx.

SOTHEBY’S have announced that they are to move the Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art sales they usually hold in December to February.