US

There were auction highs and lows during New York’s March Asia week that saw Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) and Christie’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) hosting eight sales in four days, from March 19-22.

On May 17-18, Sotheby’s New York rooms are mounting a sale entitled By Design which features furnishings that have either been designed or selected for decorative schemes by leading interior designers.

Phillips have released details of a bumper sale of Contemporary art to be held in New York on May 13. The announcement came as art trade rumours persist about the reasons for the auction house postponing their May 6 sale of Impressionist and Modern art until June at the earliest.

SOTHEBY’S former chairman, A. Alfred Taubman, convicted in December of conspiring with rival auction house Christie’s to fix fees charged to sellers, must now wait until April 22 for sentencing.

A GROUP of investors has taken control of both Pittsburgh’s Dargate Auction Gallery and ewolfs, the troubled Cleveland-based dotcom enterprise.

With less than a month until the crunch series of Impressionist and Modern Art sales in New York, it is still not clear whether Phillips will be joining Sotheby’s and Christie’s at sales which netted the company $124m last year.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s may not have had a vintage New York Asian Art series this March, but private and trade buyers continued to compete for the best quality fresh-to-the-market entries.

SHORT of George Washington’s ‘cherry tree’ axe (or, possibly, his cherrywood teeth) this set of binoculars is probably the most poignant of US Presidential personal possessions.

USA: AUCTIONEERS Skinner Inc. are bidding to capture a larger slice of the top end of the market by moving their flagship American Furniture and Decorative Arts department out of the small town of Bolton and into Boston.

AS New York’s Asia Week came to a close last week, early reports suggest the market for Oriental work is internationally still very strong and that in this field at least business is back to normal in the American capital.

Luxury sets were a feature of the Pacific Book Auctions sale of February 7 and seen left are sample volumes of a 48-volume set of the works of Alexandre Dumas, one of 1000 ‘Editions de Medicis’ sets published in Boston c.1900 and here sumptuously bound in dark green morocco gilt with red inlays to the covers, which reached $13,000 (£9155).

WILLIAM Wood’s New Englands Prospect..., first published in London in 1634, was intended to “enrich the knowledge of the mind-travelling Reader, or benefit the future Voyager”.

A high spot of the Sotheby’s sale of December 12 was a group of Jane Austen firsts in the original boards. Illustrated above right is the former Lady Shelley/Earl Spencer/Jerome Kern copy of her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility of 1811, the blue boards with cream paper spines, which made $70,000 (£49,295).

NOTED St. James’s Asian specialists Rossi and Rossi leave their Jermyn Street showrooms for New York this month for an exciting show which runs until March 26 at the galleries of Dickinson Roundell, 19 East 66th Street.

US auction house Dargate will be put up for auction on March 30 without reserve. The decision follows the failure of the first attempt on September 7 last year, when the starting bid for the fixed assets, ongoing business, goodwill, Website, mailing list and other holdings was set at $500,000.

Mallet, one of London’s most famous and venerable antiques dealerships, are opening prestigious new permanent galleries on New York’s Upper East Side.

Phillips-Selkirk, the St Louis, Missouri auction house owned by Phillips de Pury Luxembourg, has a new name and a new owner.

NEW YORK: MARINE paintings are a specialist area which have received plenty of attention from auction houses eager to tap into the wealth of those rich enough to enjoy mucking around in boats.

VICTORIA Borwick, until last autumn director of the Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fairs, has joined Florida-based IFAE (International Fine Art Expositions) as a fair director.

USA: Wedgwood wares formed a significant slice of Skinner’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) 890-lot auction of English and Continental furniture and decorations on January 19. Of the 230-odd lots of ceramics that featured in the sale, two-thirds comprised works from that factory.