Auctions

AFTER 32 years in business, Peter Heraty of Andwells Antiques, Hartley Witney, Hampshire, tells me that on June 28 he “will lock the door for the last time”, a couple of weeks before his 66th birthday.

EXPECT around 45 dealers at Cooper Antiques Fairs’ popular Cheshire County Antiques Fair this weekend from June 20 to 22. This is Somerset-based organiser Sue Ede’s premier Northern fixture and is held three times a year at Arley Hall, near Knutsford.

FRANCE: Knitting was a great leveller in the 18th century, it seems. An ivory pair of knitting needles, said to have once belonged to Marie-Antoinette, sold for €26,000 at Piasa (17.94% buyer’s premium) sale or royal memorabilia in Paris on May 21.

David Rogers Jones has sold a lot of Welsh dressers in his 44 years as an auctioneer in the principality but only two of this rare form incorporating a grandfather clock. Peculiar to the mid-Wales county of Merionethshire, the form, c.1810, is well-known in the reference books but this is the first the auctioneer has seen since he sold another 15-20 years ago. And it’s a great example.

Cheffins will sell a Suffolk collection of printed creamwares in their June 25-26 sale. Specialist George Archdale has made many personal discoveries during the cataloguing of the £30,000 collection, including the origin of the popular transfer Palemon and Lavinia.

To you and me it’s just a 1950s enamel station sign but to railwayana enthusiasts – and to Gloucestershire Worcestershire Railwayana Auctions who are currently selling it at their first private treaty auction – this is quite simply the most desirable ‘totem’ ever to come on the market. So what’s all the fuss about?

The combination of a single-owner collection in a specialist niche corner of the market with a not over-large and mostly market-fresh selection of realistically estimated material were the keys to the warm reception that greeted Sotheby’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of Scientific instruments in their Olympia rooms on May 28. All bar 15 of the 155 lots, just short of 90 per cent (92 per cent by value) changed hands for a total of £262,350.

VENERABLE top Mayfair dealers Partridge hold an exhibition of French clocks at their gallery at 144-146 New Bond Street, London W1 from June 12 to 28.

AN early 19th century bowfront chest of five over three drawers, mahogany strung with satinwood. Doesn’t sound too special does it? That’s until you realise that the description is of a fully fitted tea caddy measuring just 91/2in by 8in high (24 by 20cm). Lots of interest in this rare novelty saw it climb to take the top price of David Lay’s mammoth Penzance sale at £4400.

Highest bid among the 158 lots of Impressionist & Expressionist works on paper in the Tremmel collection auctioned by Ketterer Kunst on May 5-6 was the €130,000 (£89,700), just over top-estimate, paid in the room by a Rhineland dealer against six telephone bidders for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Fränzi am Wasser Liegend (Fränzi Reclining at the Waterside, c.1910) in gouache, watercolour and chalk, 13 x 17in (33 x 43.5cm).

THOUGH the May 21 sale held by Dominic Winter was a collectors’ sale that also included motoring, maritime and railway models, photographs, prints, etc., it was the aviation material that had star billing. There was yet another selection from the Amédée Gauthier collection of photographs, arranged as before in thematic lots.

Included among the fountains, wellheads and lead figures at Sotheby’s Sussex on 20-21 May were 18 watering cans from the collection built up over 15 years by John Massey, a senior director of the famous Haws Watering Can Company for over 25 years.

Greg Martin is a name synonymous with the finest and the most spectacularly expensive of American firearms. In this respect the June 16 Greg Martin Auctions sale will live up to expectations with a rare 1849 Colt revolver, but most British attention will be focused on a group of Nelson memorabilia which includes Vice Admiral Collingwood’s copy of Nelson’s standing orders for battle, drawn up on the Victory on October 9-10, 1805 and signed Nelson & Brontë.

Among the highlights of the collection of the late John Stewart Parry sold by Bruton Knowles at the Tithe Barn, Southam from May 19-23 was this carved and painted wood armorial figure of a greyhound. Standing 211/2in (55cm) high and retaining its original paintwork, the 19th century piece received plenty of interest from the trade before it was knocked down to a London dealer for £3600 (plus 15% buyer’s premium).

Christie’s have helped negotiate the sale to the Victoria and Albert Museum of the Castlereagh gold inkstand created by Paul Storr and Philip Rundell for the British diplomat Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) in 1818.

Christie’s South Kensington : May 15 was a crowded day in the Decorative Arts calendar. Both Christie’s South Kensington and Bonhams’ Bond Street rooms fielded sizeable decorative arts selections, much of it of crossover interest, which presumably presented potential buyers with something of a dilemma when it came to deciding which sale to attend in person.

Every dealer has one – a painful story to relate about some rare and valuable object they let pass fleetingly through their hands at a knock-down price only to learn later of its true significance and value.

Apparently consigned for sale by a local lady who had no idea of its commercial potential – it had been acquired as holiday reading when she was a young girl – a 1937 first edition of The Hobbit was sold at £10,300 in a general antiques sale held by Fieldings in Hagley, Worcester-shire, on April 26.

CHRISTIE’S (20.93/11.96% buyer’s premium) eschewed Art Nouveau altogether at their 20th Century Decorative Arts sale on May 20. This short outing was 83 per cent sold by lot (63 from 76) and 87 per cent by value, and raised a premium-inclusive €3.41m (£2.35m).

The ARTS & CRAFTS section of the most recent of the 20th Century Art & Design sales to be held in Cincinnati by Treadway & Toomey Galleries partnership on May 3 kicked off with a Gustave Stickley dining table at $12,000 (£7360), and Stickley pieces of all shapes and sizes popped up regularly thereafter.