Auctions

Dismissed by some as the equivalent of Clarice Cliff, the brilliantly coloured, Vorticist-influenced linocuts produced by the Grosvenor School during the inter-war years continue to be the most hotly contested commodity at UK print auctions, particularly when they emerge from long-established private collections.

AMONG all the specialist collecting areas, few can be as specialised or as fervent as the market in items relating to the Titanic. Devizes auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Son (15/10% buyer’s premium) have capitalised on the way enthusiasts will pay big money for anything relating to the doomed liner by holding two specialist sales a year, in April and in September.

Topping the sale of fine watches held at Bonhams’ Bond Street (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) rooms on April 15, was this 18th century gold pair cased verge watch. This had a signed and numbered movement (562) by Daniel Delander, who was free of the Clockmakers Company in 1699, and was contained in plain gold cases marked for London, 1716.

Pictured right is the highlight of Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) first football memorabilia sale of 2003 on March 26. A Cup Tie at Crystal Palace, Corinthians v. Manchester City, by Charles Ernest Cundall, in oil on panel 231/4in x 2ft 51/2in (60 x 75cm), signed C. Cundall lower right, set a new auction record for the artist when it was knocked down to London dealer Chris Beetles for £42,000, double the upper estimate.

Illustrated are a pair of ice pails, covers and liners from the Duke of Newcastle’s Derby porcelain service, c.1797, dispersed by Mellors and Kirk in Nottingham on April 10.

Among the miniatures and novelties at Dreweatt Neate’s 2 April sale, there was especial interest in a 37-lot private collection of card-cases amassed over 50 years by an Oxfordshire vendor.

A private collection of 99 microscopes was the highlight of this three-day sale at John Bellmans. No fewer than nine examples realised four-figure sums, the best seller being a 19th century lacquered brass binocular petrological microscope by Watson & Sons which sold to a private collector from London at £3100.

Two early watercolour drawings of rabbits in snowy settings were offered as part of a Bonhams sale of April 1. That seen right shows one rabbit making a snowball while another leans on a fence, while in the illustration reproduced below right, the two rabbits are building a snowman.

DOMINATED as the Doncaster sale at Wilkinsons on 23 February was by solid English oak, it also had its more esoteric moments in the high-price range. But in fact Sid Wilkinson was rather disappointed in the results on these two very different examples of carving.

Sensible estimates coupled with lots of good -quality material were the key to success at Ross’s (12.5% buyer’s premium) in Belfast on March 5. The 252-lot catalogue, from which 90 per cent of pictures were sold by value, taking a hammer total of £350,000, had something to suit all pockets and auctioneer Daniel Clarke felt it to be the sort of sale in which it would have been “impossible not to have found something you like”.

“AS extreme as always with focused bidding on the key lots,” was Victorian specialist Grant Ford’s frank description of the selective response to Sotheby’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) mid-season British Sale at Bond Street.

Topographical views of Valetta Harbour, Malta, continue to be one of the most solid performers in the salerooms. The latest quality example to turn up in the provinces was this signed Girolamo Gianni (1837-1887) oil on card, right, offered at the Chichester rooms of Stride’s (15% buyer’s premium) on February 28 with an estimate of £4000-6000.

THIS Saturday sale was one of the series of dolls and toys specialist events extending the West Yorkshire auctioneers’ Andrew Harley's reputation in the niche market beyond the more frequent antiques events.

Auctioneer Neil Freeman said that he could not remember a high price for multiple cased fish during his 20 years’ experience in the market for antique piscatoria. This 5ft 10in by 4ft 11in (1.78 x 1.50m) cabinet was one of a pair containing 15 brown trout caught by the ninth Earl of Coventry during a fruitful fly-fishing holiday in Ireland in 1879.

FELLOWS & Sons, the Birmingham-based firm of auctioneers and valuers, have started major expansion plans by opening a new 15,000 sq ft auction house in Great King Street, Hockley.

Coming up in Buckingham: A clockwork model of a V5 Citroën half-track – the first vehicle to cross the Sahara during the 1922 trans-Sahara expedition – is expected to make over £3000 when it is sold by Vectis, the Teesside auction house, in April.

Provenance, Provenance Provenance, this was the key to the runaway success of Sotheby’s 539-lot, £1.66m sale of items formerly owned by the famous engineer James Watt and his son James Watt Junior that had been carefully passed down through his family.

THE COVER of the catalogue issued by Cheffins for their Cambridge sale of March 19 made clever use of what I take to have been the coloured title of the 1794 French edition of Moses Harris L’Aurelien... that they sold for £4800. In rubbed red morocco gilt, this famous study of moths and butterflies was a large paper copy illustrated with 44 coloured plates, with text in French and English.

The death of Walter Moorcroft last year and the strong prices at Sotheby’s recent dispersal of the Wade collection have reinforced the popularity of this market, especially for the earlier Macintyre wares. A small collection at Bonham’s sale in Bury St Edmunds yielded the following results.

Peter Rindisbacher (1806-1834) was a Swiss-born artist who was the first Western artist to leave a significant visual record of colonial frontier life in Western Canada during the early 19th century.