International

Miety Heiden, Sotheby’s Amsterdam (22% buyer’s premium) picture specialist had a sneaking suspicion that Schelde Roeier, an oil on canvas by Belgian Expressionist Constant Permeke (1886-1952), would do well when it was offered in the 170-lot May 27 sale of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Dutch capital. But no-one was prepared for the record breaking sum.

US: DATES of October 14 to 20 have been fixed for the second annual New York Fall Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York, and the opening night preview party will benefit the Frick Collection, one of Manhattan’s most celebrated museums.

LAPADA has issued some valuable guidelines to the recipients of cheques relating to the Sotheby’s and Christie’s price-fixing settlement in the USA. As the cheques began to arrive by post last week many were surprised to see that the US Federal Government had deducted a withholding tax from the awards.

THE Decorative Arts sale on May 19 at Tajan (14.35/20.33% buyer’s premium) was devoted almost exclusively to Art Deco and saw 165 of its 288 lots (57 per cent) find takers en route to a total of €3.18m (£2.2m) including premium. Unlike the sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the catalogue was in French only with no English translations.

The ARTS & CRAFTS section of the most recent of the 20th Century Art & Design sales to be held in Cincinnati by Treadway & Toomey Galleries partnership on May 3 kicked off with a Gustave Stickley dining table at $12,000 (£7360), and Stickley pieces of all shapes and sizes popped up regularly thereafter.

A man who had a 17th century Dutch panel painting stolen from his home more than 20 years ago has failed in an Appeal Court to win compensation from Christie’s, who offered the picture for sale in 1997. Key to the test case was Christie’s ability to show they had acted in good faith, adding further legal weight to the importance of due diligence.

Vectis, the largest toy auctioneer in the world, with a turnover of £5m, is to open in America. Bryan Goodall, who has owned the Teesside company for seven years, has recently acquired The Diecast Toy Exchange, an auction house based in York, Pennsylvania.

WHILE in New York for the International Fine Art Fair, I dropped into Mallett’s new shop at 929 Madison Avenue. It could not have a better location and it is glamorous enough to have already made its mark in this select corner of Manhattan.

IT will be some months before many deals are clinched and further money changes hands, but with some exceptions I think the 61 top dealers at the tenth International Fine Art Fair in New York from May 9 to 14 found their stay in Manhattan profitable.

AN ARRAY of elegant objects sold mostly within estimates at the Celebration of the English Country House auction at Sotheby’s New York (20/12% buyer’s premium) on April 30 and May 1.

ACCORDING to residents of the Trapani region in Sicily, the coral to be found there is the reddest in the world. This may be myth but what certainly is not fabrication is the popularity and desirability of objects made from this striking natural material.

It hardly qualifies as a book, but the data card book in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin recorded critical values for input into the lunar module computer during the Apollo XI mission of 1969, autograph data that enabled them to make the first moon landing, certainly qualifies as an historical technical document.

THE London Irish sales are the annual litmus test of the very top end of the Irish picture market. Upcoming at the time of writing, this year’s sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s (May 15 and 16) seem to lack the numbers of big hitting pictures seen over the past ten years, reflecting the reluctance of vendors to come into today’s nervous market in which estimates are based upon realities rather than the wishful thinking that used to be good enough.

BEARING the simple, one-word title ‘Literature’, an April 8 sale held by Christie’s New York (19.5/10% buyer's premium) was mostly concerned with books of the 19th and 20th centuries. Earlier works were rather thin on the ground and the principle lot in this category, a 1632 second folio Shakespeare, with the ‘To the Reader’ leaf in facsimile and with some outer leaves washed and pressed before it was bound in crimson morocco gilt by Rivière, was left unsold on an estimate of $90,000-120,000.

THE NAME of Jean-Baptiste de Machault d’Arnouville (1701-94), Finance and Navy Minister under Louis XV, provided lustrous provenance to the top lots at the sale of art and furniture held by Beaussant-Lefèvre (14.35-17.94% buyer’s premium) at Drouot on April 25.

THERE was a collective sigh of relief in the New York salerooms last week when, after a long period of uncertainty following the war in Iraq and turmoil in the stockmarkets, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s held impressive Part I Impressionist and Modern sales. Any fears that anti-French feeling would spill over in the salerooms proved unfounded after French artists took the top honours at both houses.

THERE were suppressed cries of irritation from the public at the May 8 sale held in Madrid by Alcalá Subastas as the Spanish State pre-empted all the important lots of the evening, including two newly-discovered paintings by Goya.

THE Hindenburg archive, which includes the famous Leica and accessories recovered from the wreckage by Fritz Deeg, the steward onboard the airship when disaster struck on May 6, 1937, is being offered by WestLicht on May 23 and 24.

MORE than 200 dealers, mainly from New England, will gather at the Concert Field of Waterloo village, Stanhope, New Jersey over the weekend of May 17 and 18 for the state’s largest and oldest outdoor fair.

Illustrated right is one of 15 chromolitho plates after pastel originals by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot that make up a scarce, complete set of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, the work of a keen observer and talented artist who spent the years 1872-74 using the 15in refractor at Harvard Observatory.