Auctions

IT may have been the peak of the summer holiday season, but it was business as usual at Mallams (15% buyer's premium) Gloucestershire rooms when the 515-lot sale on August 19 totalled in the region of £70,000.

Furniture from Hills House, Denham, the property of Sir John and Lady Mills, will be sold at auction by Hamptons of Godalming on October 20.

RIGHT: a folding plate from an 1847 first of James Clark Ross’ Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions, the two vols. bound in later polished calf gilt by Henry Young of Liverpool, which made £1200 in a Dominic Winter sale of August 25.

CARAYOL'S (19.73/16.14% buyer’s premium) annual two-day sale at the Hôtel du Palais in Biarritz was staged this year in collaboration with Paris firm Boisgirard & Associés. With muted success; only a quarter of the 800 lots found takers for a hammer total of around €400,000 (£265,000).

ENGLISH Heritage successfully bid £11,500 for a portfolio of 47 photographs of the exterior and interior of the Crystal Palace in a Dominic Winter sale of August 25.

BULKY Victorian brown furniture may be the least attractive subject at many sales, but the most expensive entry at Keys (10% buyer's premium) 1386-lot Norfolk outing on August 3-4 was a 9ft square (2.74m) mahogany library breakfront bookcase.

IN rubbed contemporary sheep and with the fore-edges close cropped in some places, but generally in sound condition, a 1542 first edition of the scholar and dramatist Nicholas Udall’s translation of Erasmus’ compilation of ‘Apophthegmata’, as Apophthegmes, that is to saie, prompte, quicke, witty sayings, sold for £850 (Powell) in an Y Gelli sale of July 23.

TEMPTING though it is to say that word from the Specialised Postcard Auctions (10% buyer's premium) was lost in the post, this midsummer auction on July 5 has slipped through the Antiques Trade Gazette net until now. But the £23,000 sale should be recorded as one of the series which have, for years, been catering for this specialist market.

THERE are few things so distinctly American in the book auction world as the collections of ‘Oziana’ that arrive in the salerooms with remarkable regularity.

PART of a 12-vol. Winchester edition (1911-12) of the works of Jane Austen, bound in half red calf gilt by Sotherans, that made £3400 as part of the July 21 Lyon & Turnbull sale at Jordanstone.

FEATURING a fine portrait initial of Henry VIII and other devices associated with the Tudor monarchs, a vellum document of November 24, 1537, in which the Priory of Combewell [near Goudhurst in Kent] is granted by the king to Thomas Culpeper, was sold for £4400 in an August 26 sale of autographs, historical documents and ephemera held by Mullock Madeley of Ludlow.

Two very different 19th century bedspreads at Hampton & Littlewood's (15% buyer's premium) July 28 sale underlined Christopher Hampton’s belief that the importance of collectables today cannot be over-emphasised.

ONE of 11, generally very fine, British drinking glasses consigned from ‘a Highland lady’ to The Scottish Sale held by Bonhams (17.5% buyer's premium) in Edinburgh on August 18-20, was this 3 1/4in (8cm) high polychromed enamel firing glass, right, probably decorated c.1765 by member of the Beilby family of Newcastle.

WITH only eight of the 300 lots bringing four-figure sums, the Mallams (15% buyer's premium) sale on August 25 was a fairly sleepy summer affair by usual standards at Oxford, but there were pieces of interest throughout for budget-conscious bidders.

ISAAC ROSENBERG had produced just two small pamphlet collections of verse and a play before he was killed in action on April Fool’s Day, 1918, but his reputation is now established as one of the finer war poets.

THE Badminton Cabinet, the magnificent 18th century ebony, ormolu and pietra dura cabinet made at the Grand Ducal workshops in Florence and sold by Christie for a record £7.8m in 1990 is to come back on the market again in December with the same auction house.

ALTHOUGH the 616-lot sale held by Thomson, Roddick & Medcalf (15% buyer’s premium) in Edinburgh took place back on June 23, the sale highlight merits recording. This was the finely worked silver gilt globe cup, right, probably made in Germany.

THE recently published, enlarged and revised second edition of Peter McEwan’s indispensable Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture describes the Perthshire-born landscape painter Joseph Henderson (1832-1908) as “one of Scotland’s half-forgotten painters who deserves better recognition than he has hitherto received”.

THE backbone of Bonhams’ September 3 car sale at Goodwood Motor Circuit in Sussex was the little-known but highly impressive collection of the late George Milligen.

REGULAR readers of Scott Reyburn’s Art Market will be only too aware that many equestrian paintings by Sir Alfred James Munnings (1878-1959) have in recent years shown significant increases in value. As he reported as recently as Antiques Trade Gazette No 1648, July 17, Munnings’ oil sketch Newmarket Cheveley was the only work to dramatically exceed its estimate in Sotheby’s Important British Picture sale on July 1.