Auctions

The Paris high season is a time when classic sales of traditional fare are as much to the fore as buoyant sectors such as Asian, contemporary and modern and tribal art.

Stuttgart auction house Nagel (33% buyer’s premium) held its summer sale of Asian art in Salzburg having acquired an impressive array of quality pieces from European and other collections.

In what can be a doleful time for Doulton, encouraging words about the factory’s output from auctioneer Geoff Shepherd at ceramics specialist Kingham & Orme (22% buyer’s premium).

Running to just over a hundred pages and containing numerous illustrations of ships, figureheads and portrait busts, an accounts ledger kept by a Cumbrian shipbuilder has gone to a local museum.

This hitherto unknown iron – part of select group of perhaps a dozen very early golf clubs from the late 17th or early 18th century – emerged at Gorringe’s in Lewes on June 26.

Comprising some 3000 books that range in date from 1473-1840, one of the finer collection of books on agriculture ever assembled will be dispersed by Forum Auctions in a July 10-11 sale that runs to more than 800 lots.

Newly formed Australian firm Abacus Auctions holds its second sale on July 22, devoted to coins and banknotes plus a selection of collectables and sporting memorabilia.

British watercolours depicting the beautiful county of Devon and painted during the medium’s golden age drew eager bidding at Cheffins of Cambridge (22.5% buyer’s premium).

The latest batch of period portraits to pass through Cheffins featured several from a late-16th century property in Great Chesterford, Essex. Passed by descent, the quartet was led by an attractive English School portrait of Queen Mary I (1516-58), an oil painted on an oval 2ft x 21in (62 x 53cm) canvas.

From her Dorset cottage, artist and print-maker Rena Gardiner (1929-99) produced more than 40 guidebooks to historic places, buildings and the countryside, all of which she wrote, illustrated with drawings made directly onto litho plates and printed herself.

Having successfully dispersed the collection of Lalique glass formed by Hans and Gertrud Mueller in March this year, Sotheby’s Australia is now selling the couple’s collection of other European Art Glass.

The mammoth disposal of the Aristophil collections of historic manuscripts began last week with a premium-inclusive €17.6m series of seven June auctions offered over four days at Drouot (June 15 and 18-20).