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Third threshold won’t hurt South Kensington says director

LONDON has gained ground in the global art market during 2007 with over $2.35bn in sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s for the first six months of the year. In their US rooms the two leading auctioneers took $2.6bn over the same period.

THE Artists’ Collecting Society have completed their first year of collecting and paying out the Artists’ Resale Right. They have now been given the mandate to collect the resale right by 200 artists, including well known names like Lucien Freud and Anthony Caro.

Soon after marrying his young wife Jane, William Morris commissioned his friend Philip Webb to build them a house. The end result, completed in 1859, was Red House, named after its steep red-tiled roof.

HERITAGE grants have helped the British Museum acquire the 15th century illuminated manuscript known as the Wardington Hours.

This summer has seen a spate of sleepers awoken in provincial salerooms, but inevitably the one that grabbed the headlines in the national press was the tale of the rediscovered ‘Titian’.

High drama at the Chichester auction rooms of Henry Adams on July 19 when this pair of Chinese famille rose moon flasks shot to £760,000. The price, a house record, is also the fourth highest ever achieved in a UK auction room outside of London.

IT must be every trustee’s nightmare. You dispose of vanloads of unwanted books for what you think is a realistic £36,000, but then over a period of less than a year you see the pick of them then raise around £500,000 at auction.

Thought that internet bidding was for low value items only? The five-figure sums tendered online at two country sales last week suggest the received wisdom may need a rethink.

Antique hunters and collectors now have a way to locate fairs, centres, dealers’ shops and private sellers around the UK using a new online Collectables Map that pinpoints different locations.

When the Dorchester Fine Art saleroom Duke’s sold two rediscovered panels of Dominican saints by Fra Angelico for £1.7m, it was one of the best documented events outside the London rooms accompanied by months of pre-sale media coverage.

THE UK’s top dealer associations have struck a deal with retailer John Lewis leading to the launch of an extensive online art and antiques directory aimed at shoppers.

EDWIN Dyson of Blind Lemon Events, who organises vintage fashion fairs across the UK, recently advertised in ATG seeking deco dealers for a garden party on Sunday, July 29.

FOR the third time this year, a dealers’ survey has highlighted the unpopularity of the Artist’s Resale Right in the trade and the indifference of a majority artists to the ruling.

FREQUENTLY, the most interesting object in someone’s garage is not the car.

One of the quirkier and more unusual offerings to feature in Christie’s £3.7m sale of English furniture and works of art on June 7 was this rare Elizabethan map fragment, one of the first tapestries ever produced in England.

Bonhams are to take advantage of Sotheby’s decision to end Japanese sales by recruiting their top specialist and consultant.

France’s share of the global auction market fell by 5.8 per cent in 2006, warns the Conseil des Ventes, the national auction watchdog, in its annual report published on June 25. Worldwide auction activity, it says, rose 34 per cent over the same period.

Demand for contemporary art reached yet another new level of intensity in London’s auction rooms last week when Christie’s and Sotheby’s both posted record totals of nearly £75m for their June evening sales of contemporary works.

In 1914, Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) was living in Cornwall and enjoying the most fertile period of her career.