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Trade bodies line up to make the case for art and antiques sector

Nicholas Mellors Auctioneers in Newark has closed but Newark Antiques will continue to trade.

The Bovey Pottery Company, closed in 1957, would have passed into collecting history without incident had it not been for the ‘Our Gang’ collection of figures.

Johannes Schröder (1870-1942) was not only a wealthy German merchant but also a globetrotter and a pioneer in utilising the invention of photography to document his time.

The English porcelain specialist Simon Spero opens his 37th catalogued exhibition this week in his Kensington shop.

Estimated at £500-800, a small Old Master painting of Christ wearing the crown of thorns drew spectacular competition at Adam’s of Dublin on April 9. It came from an institution in the Irish capital which the saleroom said was “doing some spring cleaning”. It was given the pick of around 100 paintings.

No fewer than 840 lots were offered in the bumper April 5-6 sale held by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium). The most successful of them, at a record £32,000, was a presentation copy of a pioneering work that has been described as “the first practical statement of socialist doctrine”, Robert Owen’s A New View of Society… of 1813-14.

An ‘Unfashionable’ single-owner collection from a London club attracted trade and private buyers. The 98-lot sale on April 5 was held by British pictures specialist Harry Moore-Gwyn at 25 Blythe Road (20% buyer’s premium) in West Kensington.

A major attraction in a PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) sale of April 6 was the Samuel Hessel ‘DNA’ collection of scientific papers, journals and books.

MADAM – I have been reading the responses in your letters pages from the antiques trade to the stringent ivory laws appearing around the world.

Pictured here is one of several etchings by James Abbott McNeil Whistler that will feature in Swann Galleries’ sale of prints on May 2.

Nearly a quarter of the sale total at the auction held by Harry Moore-Gwyn at 25 Blythe Road (20% buyer’s premium) in West Kensington on April 5 came from a collection of original cartoons.

James Howe’s (1780-1836) c.1817 All Hallow’s Fair on Calton Hill shows an event that was already a thing of the past when the picture was completed.

A Beatrix Potter collection running to 62 lots got a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of March 30 up and running.

This 8¾in (23cm) diameter Liverpool delft charger, dated 1738, is initialled MML for Michael and Mary Lightfoot, members of a Quaker family who lived in Chester County.

A work by one of Lebanon’s most eminent painters, Khalil Saleeby (1870-1928), surfaced at Hansons (17.5% buyer’s premium) of Etwall in Derbyshire.

Offered by Keys (20% buyer’s premium) on April 6, the Sir Malcolm Arnold Collection proved to be a problematic one.

A small 6¼ x 11in (16 x 27 cm) oil on canvas by Nicolas De Staël (1914-55), titled Composition and dating from 1950, is one of the potential highlights of the contemporary art auction to be held by Dorotheum in Vienna on May 31 and June 1.

An intriguing 18th century watercolour of a tree struck by lightning fetched a multi-estimate sum at Forum Auctions’ (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) March 30 sale in London.

Published in 1631 in Rinteln, a small town in Lower Saxony, Friederich Spee’s Cautio Criminalis, seu de Processibus Contra Sagas is a first edition in much later boards of a book that has been described as the first serious attack on witchcraft trials and their use of torture.