International

FRANCE: A remarkable 21 new dealers are joining this year’s 21st Biennale des Antiquaires, which will be held at the Carrousel du Louvre, in Paris from September 20 to 29.

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.

ArtCurial, the Paris art gallery/bookshop based at the Hôtel Dassault on the Champs-Elysées, have moved to expand their auction activity by taking a minority stake in the auction firm owned by Claude Aguttes, based in the smart Paris suburb of Neuilly.

When Sotheby’s sold the second and third parts of Sotheby’s sale of the Jammes collection in Paris on March 21 and 22, the highest price was paid, as expected, for this exceptional collection of correspondence from the French father of photography, Nicéphore Niépce, and his son Isidore, featuring a heliographic reproduction of a Dutch print.

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.

The AXA insurance group have joined the battle for Drouot with an offer believed to be worth €82m (£51m), comfortably exceeding the €69m (£43m) proposed by Barclays Private Equity and the €64m (£40m) by ABN-Amro earlier this year.

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.

Museums are well known as the protectors of age, but now we have an example of how age is to prove the downfall of such an institution. The silver lining to this cloud is that it provides a unique opportunity for the trade and collectors.

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).

Look at the differences between the modern-day perspective of Amsterdam’s Nieuw Voorburgwaal, and the 1759 depiction by Dutch artist Jan de Beyer (c.1703-85) to be offered for sale from the Anton Dressman collection at Christie’s Amsterdam on April 16 with an estimate of €45,000-75,000.

The Italian art market is in shock at the arrest of one of its major players for the sale of fake works of art and other crimes.

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).

DENMARK: Given the continuing vogue for Scandinavian interiors, it comes as no surprise that the first modern art and design auction to be held by Danish auctioneers Bruun Rasmussen (25% buyer’s premium including VAT) in Århus last month on February 12, met with very favourable results.

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.