Auctions

The completion of Mark Law’s deal to buy auction house Dreweatts from stamp dealer group Stanley Gibbons has been delayed due to a change in financial backing for the £2.4m purchase.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

Written off by some as a dying area, the latest Old Master series in London defied the naysayers with encouraging results during its traditional ‘grand finale’ slot at the end of the London sales season.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

An impeccably preserved portrait of Thomas Pope, later 3rd Earl of Downe, by William Larkin (1580-1619), led Bonhams’ (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) Old Master Paintings sale on July 5.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

A record-breaking Canaletto (1697-1768) drawing was the toast of the capital’s Old Masters drawings sales.

The Zettler Glass Manufactory was founded in Munich in 1870 by Francis Xavier Zettler (1841-1916) and his father-in-law Joseph Gabriel Mayer (1808-83) – two men who combined a deep religious conviction with a love of medieval culture.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period July 6-12, 2017. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

Dealers in and collectors of Asian art were spoilt for choice around the middle of June in Europe. As well as the Asian sale series in Paris (see last week’s ATG, No 2300), a vast selection of works came up for sale in Zurich, Cologne, Brussels, Salzburg and Stuttgart.

While it is well known that Queen Victoria sent her troops tins of chocolate boxes for Christmas in the second Boer War (1899-1902), the eight scarves she personally crocheted to send to individual soldiers are not so familiar.

A 1610 first of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, a foundation work in modern astronomy, sold for €320,000 (£278,400) on June 15 at Minerva Auctions (25/18% buyer’s premium) of Rome.

It was, said specialist Michael Jeffery, “one of, if not the finest, collections of Burmantofts put together by a private individual”.

Marc Lescarbot’s Nova Francia… of 1609 is an account of French settlements in North America and what we now think of as Nova Scotia and Canada. It predates the more famous first accounts of Champlain’s voyages and discoveries by three years.