Auctions

There will be much more to come on the £2m Lewis Carroll’s Alice at Sotheby’s on June 6, but this week just one of ten recorded prints of Dodgson’s 1858 portrait of Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’, which sold for £160,000.

UK: AS EVEN the upper echelons of the trade cannot afford to stick to academic standards at the expense of turning a profit in the market for the purely decorative, one finds increasingly serious sums of money paid out for amusing trifles of zero antiquity, such as a large pair of 20th century Continental jardinières, one of which is shown here.

UK: ALTHOUGH there were no huge prices among the 416 lots at these Devon rooms, there was success across the wide range of offerings.

HOLLAND: Amsterdam is geographically well placed to hold tribal art sales for which there is an enthusiastic community of specialist dealers and collectors in Europe – in particular France and Belgium – as well as in America.

UK: ONE of only three in existence, this Sir Stanley Matthews Royal Doulton Character jug shocked all in attendance at Louis Taylor in Stoke-in-Trent on June 11.

UK: CERAMICS took the top spots at this 1650-lot Cotswolds sale in the form of a pair of mid-19th century Continental majolica stick stands.

UK: MEDALS took the top three slots in this toys, juvenilia and ephemera sale but there was a healthy take-up for toys from collectors and from a couple of Liverpool-based specialist dealers at this 537-lot auction that netted Biddle & Webb around £25,000.

Pictured here is a selection of books sold in auctions in London and New York.

UK: THIS Georgian chinoiserie framed mirror painting of c.1760 took the top slot at Sotheby’s June 13 English furniture sale when it sold to an American private buyer for £280,000.

UK: AN 80-lot collection of Japanese netsuke, inro and okimono from the deceased estate of a Lewes-based collector lifted the proceedings in Raymond P. Inman’s Sussex sale.

US: REVERED as the only Irish artist to have been fully involved in the developments of French avant garde painting during the early years of Modernism, Roderic O’Conor (1860-1940) has inspired a succession of impressive six-figure prices over the last couple of years, culminating in the £320,000 bid by a Dublin collector for a c.1903 Post-Impressionist oil, Nature Mort: Faience, at Sotheby’s June 21 sale of Modern British & Irish Art in London.

UK: ONE OR TWO lots that figured among the higher prices in this Midlands sale would seem to have been sold primarily as collections of travel or botanical plates, and these I have bypassed in favour of the following selection of books.

UK: A RARE example of Irish printing, this work by Hugh MacCaghwell, styled Aodh mac aingil, translates as A Mirror of the Sacrament of Penance and was printed at the Irish Franciscan College of St. Anthony of Padua at Louvain in 1618.

UK: TWO LOTS in this Norfolk sale stood head and shoulders above all others, at least in financial terms. One was a group of original illustrations by Charles Kerr for a Rider Haggard adventure story that made £3200 (see caption story below); the other a copy of John Arrowsmith’s London Atlas in modern half calf that reached £6600 (Heald).

UK: ILLUSTRATED here are two items used to decorate the covers of the sale catalogue issued for by Dominic Winter for their May 17 Sports sale.

FRANCE: THESE intricately patterned boxes in straw marquetry were offered by the Rouen dealers Hervieux & Motard for between £500-£1500 each at the recent Dijon Salon des Antiquaires (May 18-27).

FRANCE: DIJON’S trio of auction firms like to cash in on the presence of antiques collectors at the Dijon fair (see Fairs Sales Analysis, "Dijon cuts the mustard") and one of the highlights at the Vregille-Bizoüard sale on May 20 was this pair of early 18th century Italian engraved rococo mirrors, 3ft 11in (1.20m) tall, that tripled estimate on Fr142,000 (£13,100).

SWITZERLAND: THE sale of Classical Greek coins held at Leu, Zurich (15 per cent buyer’s premium) on May 16 was billed as the finest at least since WWII. This was hardly modest, but it certainly was not far from the truth. The sale coins were culled from the best sales of exactly the last four decades. Not only this but the coins were invariably among the finest specimens available during this time and many of them had provenances going back a lot further.

SWEDEN: AN unrestored canvas by the American painter Julius Leblanc Stewart (1855-1919) of two fashionably dressed ladies meeting on the deck of a yacht on the Côte d’Azur inspired predictably intense levels of demand when it came under the hammer at the Stockholm rooms of Stockholms Auctionsverk (17.5 per cent buyer’s premium) on May 22.

AS Roman generals used to parade the heathen idols of vanquished tribes before the populae urbis, so this monumental bronze figure of Lenin, pictured, will provide an entertaining diversion for the guests at Maurice Saatchi’s garden parties in Sussex this summer.