Auctions

OVER 2000 lots in the field of 20th Century Decorative Arts were offered for sale in Paris in late November and early December. The most lucrative Art Deco sale, at Christie’s on December 1, ran to 107 lots (93 sold) and yielded a hammer total of €2.04m (£1.43m), with a top price of €340,000 (£238,000) for a lacquered screen by Eileen Gray (c.1915). A 1927 lacquered coffee table by Gaston Suisse, with eggshell and oxidised silver decoration, tripled estimate on €55,000 (£38,500).

Wotton Auction Rooms Wotton-under-Edge October 19-20 Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent THIS wide-ranging, 1600-lot Gloucestershire sale was helped by a large number of probate estates which furnished proceedings with the type of reasonably estimated material sought after by dealers and collectors alike.

ON November 12 Christie’s (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) sold a European private collection of Pre-Columbian works of art amassed between the late 1960s and 1980. The market responded enthusiastically to fresh material of high quality with distinguished provenances. Although the lottage rate was only 73 per cent, by value, the sale came in at 93 per cent, a premium-inclusive total of $3.23m (£1.75m).

Peter Wilson, Nantwich November 17-18 Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent ALTHOUGH bidding was selective at this Cheshire sale, with only around 65 per cent of the 780 lots finding buyers, there was healthy competition for collectable ceramics such as a Royal Copenhagen set of ten colourful figures of children dressed in traditional Dutch costume by Carl Martin Hansen (1877-1941).

PRINTED ephemera, often disregarded detritus, is not generally highly valued material. But should it chance to survive, it can acquire socio-historical and even monetary value.

FIRST printed by Berthelet in 1531, Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Govenor, a treatise on the education of statesmen that was dedicated to Henry VIII and found great favour at court, has been described as “not only the earliest treatise on moral philosophy in English but the first of an imposing array which introduced into England the cultural and political ideals of the renaissance”.

Autographs, manuscripts and printed ephemera have long been a great strength of sales at Strides of Chichester, but the December 3 sale was rather special, being devoted entirely to that field and, though not billed as such, the first part of the personal collection of Derek White, who for many years has catalogued for the Sussex saleroom.

Complete with its original bill of sale and warranty, this fine 18ct gold chronograph minute repeater pocket watch made by London maker J.W. Benson sold into the trade for £3100 at John Taylor’s (12% buyer’s premium) of Louth on December 7.

Is there a Christmas factor in the auction rooms? Cheffins auctioneer Jonathan Law (Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent) believes that the season may have some effect in putting a little pressure on people to buy rather than wait.

Christie’s King Street (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) were pulling out all the stops for their first full week of the month.

ANOTHER Greek author whom Aldus published was Aristotle, whose Opera Omnia appeared in a five-part, seven-volume edition between 1495 and 1498.

Halls (15% buyer’s premium) "It was quite a rare object, in good working order and sang beautifully.”

Richard Winterton (15% buyer’s premium)Trained by Tom Coulthwaite, who schooled a number of high-class jumpers in the first decades of the 20th century, Irish-bred Eremon was one of the top chasers of his era. And 1907 was very much his year.

Thos. Wm. Gaze & Son (10% buyer’s premium)At 13in (33cm) high this really is a very good-sized example of William Moorcroft’s celebrated Hazeldene design.

SOLD at £42,000 to a collector in a November 30 sale of Continental books and manuscripts held by Sotheby’s was a 1566 Lyon edition of Celsus’ De re medica from the library of France’s ‘Prince of Poets’, Pierre de Ronsard. Autograph material by de Ronsard is of the utmost rarity, with just two documents entirely in his hand recorded (both in the Bibliothèque Nationale) and ony two or three volumes bearing his signature, as this one does, remaining in private hands.

MINDFUL of how demand at many sales is polarised between the ‘best and the rest’, Sotheby’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) decided to tackle this prevalent attitude head on with a new type of sale.

“Business has been good, but to achieve this I have had to work extremely hard.” This is how Chris Beetles summed up 2004 and, having already taken over £500,000 in sales from his renowned annual exhibition of British illustrators, he is ending the year on a bullish note.

With TEFAF Maastricht beckoning, it was hardly surprising that Dutch and Flemish painting should capture most of major prices at the December round of Old Master paintings sales in London.

The two best-selling pieces of furniture offered outside London in 2004 were sold during one of the very first and one of the last sales of the year.

Attracting some welcome national publicity for Swindon book specialists Dominic Winter (15% buyer’s premium) on November 11, was the remarkable performance of a group of early railway tickets consigned for sale by the widow of a Gloucestershire collector.