International

THE Dowager Lady Langham, who authorised the HOK (18.5% buyer's premium) sale of the Langham family’s collections on September 27, is a world authority on Belleek having been collector/dealer for many years and having written three books on the subject. At the sale she only parted company with nine pieces of the Fermanagh pottery, most of which sold above expectations.

THE Mira Jacob Collection sale at Bailly-Pommery-Voutier & Sotheby's (23.92 - 14.35% buyer's premium) included a smattering of drawings and watercolours by artists outside the dealer’s sphere of influence – from a small Picasso ink sketch of a Glass and Jar, bought in at €44,000, to a Degas pencil portrait of Thérèse Degas, 11 x 8 1/2in (28 x 22cm), which sold at a quadruple-estimate €77,000 (£52,400).

DELVAUX and Redon were among eight artists granted solo exhibitions at Jacob’s Bateau Lavoir gallery in Rue de Seine between 1960 and 1986, along with James Ensor, Charles Filiger, Bernadette Kelly, Pierre Klossowski, Marie Laurencin, and Paul Wunderlich – all represented at Bailly-Pommery-Voutier & Sotheby's (23.92 - 14.35% buyer's premium), notably Filiger with 13 lots, and Ensor with eight.

DAY two of the sale of the Mira Jacob Collection, held by Bailly-Pommery-Voutier & Sotheby’s (23.92 - 14.35% buyer's premium), was devoted to prints and illustrated books and yielded €780,000 (£530,000) with all but seven of the 166 lots selling.

JUST a week after they dismantle the stands of their art and design fair, London-based organisers Brian and Anna Haughton return to the Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th St, New York for their 16th annual International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show.

JUST before the onslaught of numismatic sales in London, there have been a number of interesting dispersals abroad.

THREE leading international dealers in antique needlework are getting together in New York later this month for a special selling exhibition – The Admirable Art of the Needle: Samplers & Embroideries 1650-1850.

THERE was another vast sale (2180 lots) in Osnabruck held by F.R. Kuenker (15% buyer’s premium) on September 27-28. It was the classical collection of Professor Dr Hagen Tronnier that had clearly been formed over a very long time and there were many pieces which had not been available for general study for ages. This factor resulted in some higher than expected prices.

POLICE have alerted dealers across Ireland to a cache of antiques stolen in a weekend raid at the home of Lord Henry Mountcharles on his Slane Castle estate in County Meath.

TWO diamonds with a reported value of nearly £8m were were stolen from the Chopard stand at the Paris Biennale.

THIS year’s Monte-Carlo International Fine Art & Antiques Fair, scheduled to run December 31-January 6 at the Grimaldi Forum, has been cancelled.

THE Venini factory of Venice are to meet with their lawyers this week to discuss stepping up legal action against the family of Italian glass designer Fulvio Bianconi.

HIGH spot of the Asian works of art section of Skinners’ July 17 sale in Boston was an $85,000 (£49,945) bid on a pair of 16th/17th century, cane-seated hardwood ‘Official’s Hat’ chairs from the collection of Professor James Hightower. In a post-sale announcement, Skinners Asian specialist described them as “quintessential examples... and undoubtedly the finest pair of hat chairs to have come on the market in decades”.

OCTOBER is the busiest month in New York for London-based organisers Brian and Anna Haughton who, as Haughton Fairs, brought quality, vetted fairs to Manhattan in 1989 with the launch of their International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show at The Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue.

COMMISSIONED in 1908 by the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Co., Mists of Yellowstone, one of many pictures of what is now the Yellowstone National Park region painted by Thomas Moran, nearly doubled the previous saleroom best for the artist on July 29. It made $4.4m (£2.42m) in the grand ballroom of the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino in Reno, Nevada – where Coeur d’Alene Art hold an annual auction, the big event of the year for well-heeled lovers of Western art.

PICTURED right is one of Nicolaas Johannes Roosenboom’s (1805-1880) classic winter landscapes, The Pleasure Trip: Elegant figures on Ice, which made €9000 (£6000) at Christie’s Amsterdam (23.205/11.9% buyer’s premium) Pictures Watercolours and Drawings sale on September 1. The signed oil on panel was 23in x 2ft 4in (58 x72cm).

AN Americana sale held by Eldreds of East Dennis on August 5-6 included a number of works by Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr. (1910-82), a Cape Cod artist for whom mermaids and sailors, lighthouses and balloons were key themes, and the picture top right, a late addition to the catalogue, proved one of the Massachusetts sale’s greater successes, at $40,000 (£22,000).

SOMETHING I overlooked when compiling my principal natural history round-ups of the summer was a copy of ‘Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary’ – or at least that was how it was described in a 10 word entry in the catalogue of a May 21-23 sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

AN August 21-22 sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, included not only the panoramic view of Hong Kong seen top right, but a dozen or so other views of the Hongs at Canton, Hong Kong itself and other European trading settlements in China.

IN Antiques Trade Gazette No.1655, I illustrated a first octavo edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, 1840-44, that sold for $48,000 (£25,920) in a May sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In their August 21-22 sale they had another, half morocco bound and rather better looking set – one originally sold by Clarendon Harris, a book dealer of Worcester, Mass – which made $64,000 (£35,200).