Auctions

With Sir Walter Scott setting the tone and Victoria and Albert in the vanguard, 19th century followers of fashion developed a highly romanticised passion for all things Scottish.

At Sandown Park Antiques Fair on February 15, Paul Braithwaite on stand HW5 is offering this early 20th century surgeons’ fitted box, made by Mayer & Meltzer, surgical instrument makers in London, for £385.

At first glance, this 7ft 6in x 5ft 7in (2.28 x 1.70m) canvas, right, of the Temptation of Adam by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Santerre (1651-1717) might seem to be a fairly standard, if unusually large, depiction of one of the most hackneyed religious themes in Western art.

Appearing at Frank R. Marshall’s (15% buyer’s premium) sale at Knutsford, Cheshire on January 11 and selling at £720, was this 10 x 7in (25 x 18cm) oil-on-canvas, right, by Augustus Edwin Mulready (fl1863-1880 d.1886). Framed, mounted and indistinctly signed, it showed a characteristic subject for the artist, and was estimated at £200-300.

AFTER almost five years in the heart of London’s West End, one of our top dealers, Kevin Smith of Windsor House Antiques, has decided Mayfair is not for him.

THE first afternoon session of a January 20-21 antiques sale held by Lawrences of Crewkerne presented more than 400 lots of books, amongst them a good collection of private press books featuring the wood-engraved illustrations of David Jones.

The final Dix Noonan Webb (15% buyer’s premium) 2004 sale in London, on December 14, was a massive 1610-lot affair with a diversity of offerings. The total hammer take was £282,905.

TO the non-specialist, a cracked and chipped blue and white 18th century delft plate might have seemed reasonably estimated at £60-100 in the January 5 sale held by Brightwells (15% buyer’s premium).

Thomson Roddick & Medcalf. Buyer’s premium: 15 per centTWO large private consignments accounted for half the lots at Thomson Roddick & Medcalf’s Edinburgh sale and had the predictable effect of pulling in bidders from south of the Border.

PICTURES which belong to a very specific collecting area are frequently in much greater demand than those of comparable quality that lack esoteric appeal.

Charterhouse, Sherborne, December 10, Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent TWO fine timepieces led this Dorset sale. Top price by a long way was the £21,000 bid for an unusual brass skeleton clock designed for a Victorian railway industrialist.

Christie's King Street, 20 January, Buyer's Premium: 20/12%.The most expensive piece from the 26 lots offered from Endsleigh, the Devon cottage designed for the 6th Duke of Bedford was this 6ft (1.8m) wide carved oak side table designed c.1801-14 by Jeffry Wyatt, the architect responsible for the main decorative scheme at Endsleigh, and made by local cabinetmaker John Williams of Exeter.

Back in the late 1920s, during the height of the so-called Etching Boom, prints by Scottish contemporary artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey were the subject of the sort of feverish speculation which now characterises the market for cutting-edge names like Damien Hirst, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan.

It would be amiss not to record the fortunes of the rare George II provincial silver tea kettle that, as reported in ATG no.1663, dated November 6 had been consigned for sale at Toronto fine art auctioneers Waddingtons (15% buyer’s premium) on December 6.

Two of the strongest performances in the December ceramics sales came from the glass sections offered at Bonhams Bond Street on December 8 and at Sotheby’s Olympia two weeks later.

Damien Hirst’s tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, once the centrepiece of the Charles Saatchi collection and arguably the best-known work by a late 20th century British artist, has been sold to an American collector for a price close to £7m.

Morphets, Harrogate, November 25 Buyer’s premium: 15/10 per centTWO different female figures stole the limelight at Harrogate; a rather racy bronze and alabaster, semi-nude who graced the catalogue front cover, and a much smaller, more demure, bronze bust of a young girl.

BOOKS, playbills and pictures from a collection formed by the late Gerald Tyler, an amateur actor and producer with the Leeds and Bradford Civic Theatres, founding chairman of the British Children’s Theatre Association and a man who was active in drama education, formed part of a January 8 sale held by Rowley Fine Art of Ely.

THE new year for Bloomsbury Auctions kicked off on January 14 with a general sale and opened with a selection of books on heraldry and genealogy from the estate of the late Michael Maclagan. Richmond Herald.

Star billing at Christie’s King Street sale of selected English and Continental ceramics on December 6 went to three Meissen Augustus Rex covered baluster jars of 1740 with the AR monogram and Dreher’s marks XII to the base.