International

For the first time in its 19-year history, Atlantique City – New Jersey’s massive indoor antiques and collectables show – is going to allow shoppers through the Atlantic City Convention Center doors on a Friday.

A new auction high for the Neapolitan Impressionist Vincenzo Irolli (1860-1949) was established by Sotheby’s (20-15.42% buyer’s premium, excluding VAT) last month in Milan when they offered this oil on canvas entitled La Pesca Fortunata (A good haul) in their sale of 19th century pictures on December 13.

STAYING with the international mood of the Diary this week, Sweden’s top antiques event, the 28th annual Stockholm International Antiques Fair runs at the Stockholm Messan from January 27 to 30 with a preview on the evening of January 26.

BIDDERS at this week’s sale of the Rowler Collection of Georg Jensen silver at Christie’s Rockefeller Center, New York, might be interested to learn that, according to Michael James, founder and director of Jensen specialists The Silver Fund, virtually the entire collection of some 800 pieces was acquired for Rowler by The Silver Fund over the past six years.

A UNIQUE archive of journals and notebooks, including the secret recipe for Tiffany’s signature Favrile glass, is now available for public inspection at the Corning Museum in New York.

GOING further afield, The South African Antique Dealers Association hold their national fair in Cape Town on February 19 and 20 with a gala opening on the evening of February 18.

AFTER 50 years at Manhattan’s Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street, it is little wonder that the Winter Antiques Show is the favourite fair of many New Yorkers – and, increasingly, for many others.

Nadar (1820-1910), real name Félix Tournachon, is best known as one of the leading specialists in early photographic portraits.

NEVER forget there is another armory in Manhattan, the one downtown at Lexington Avenue at 26th Street, and that one hosts some splendid shows throughout the year, starting in 2005 with the appropriately named Antiques at the Armory from January 21 to 23.

STAYING in the United States, but in the warmer climes of the South, Palm Beach, Florida, is becoming a busy place for art and antiques of all types.

NOW firmly established as a truly international forum for ceramics, the sixth annual New York Ceramics Fair returns to the National Academy of Design Museum, 1083 Fifth Avenue from January 19 to 23 with a $75 preview evening on January 18.

Containing several hundred pencil drawings, a Spanish chemistry textbook used by Salvador Dali during his student days at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid was sold for $12,000 (£6280) in a Sotheby’s New York sale of December 3.

AS recently as a decade ago, the Pennsylvanian Impressionists or New Hope School – perhaps the most recognisable group of painters to emerge from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) – remained a relatively untapped seam for ‘serious’ auctioneers of the Mid-Atlantic States.

THE US is not the only North American country notching up record totals for auctions of its own domestically-produced art. On November 25 at Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hotel, just a week before Sotheby’s achieved the first ever nine-figure total for a sale of American art, the Vancouver-based auctioneers Heffel Fine Art (15% buyer’s premium) held the highest-ever grossing sale of Fine Canadian Art.

OVER 2000 lots in the field of 20th Century Decorative Arts were offered for sale in Paris in late November and early December. The most lucrative Art Deco sale, at Christie’s on December 1, ran to 107 lots (93 sold) and yielded a hammer total of €2.04m (£1.43m), with a top price of €340,000 (£238,000) for a lacquered screen by Eileen Gray (c.1915). A 1927 lacquered coffee table by Gaston Suisse, with eggshell and oxidised silver decoration, tripled estimate on €55,000 (£38,500).

ANOTHER Greek author whom Aldus published was Aristotle, whose Opera Omnia appeared in a five-part, seven-volume edition between 1495 and 1498.

AFTER 43 years, the annual Original Miami Beach Antique Show is a world attraction but, despite its longevity, it still rings the changes, as you will see at this year’s staging from January 20 to 24 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive.

Paris auctioneer Jacques Tajan is severing his links with Tajan SA, the firm he founded in 1994, and setting up an art consultancy firm in Brussels, where he has already acquired 1000sqm premises near Avenue Louise.

The small group of Sir Isaac Newton’s manuscripts and papers offered by Sotheby’s New York on December 3 were not for the most part concerned with the work that will forever ensure his fame – although an autograph draft of a letter concerning the presentation of six copies of the 1726, third edition of the Principia to the Académie Royale des Sciences sold at $28,000 (£14,560).

A STUNNING early Ming dynasty dish has equalled the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of Chinese porcelain.