Auctions

Following the announcement in August of a newly-discovered 1938 fairground scene by Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976) scheduled to appear at Sotheby’s on December 13, it has emerged that the scene depicted is not, in fact, Beswick Fair, near Manchester, as had been mooted.

LONDON coins, medals and stamps specialists Spink have bought the American stamp auctioneers Shreves Philatelic Galleries.

Leyburn auctioneers Tennants have standardised their buyer’s premium rates across their sales.

OLD film footage of youngsters playing amid the rubble of the Blitz-ravaged London showed that even in our darkest hour war could be turned into a game.

Kent’s Canterbury Auction Galleries were one of the few salerooms to hold a good quality art and antiques sale in August.

As of September 1, the Penkridge Salerooms come under new ownership.

DUBLIN auctioneers James Adam have negotiated a €3.5m (£2.4m) sale of remarkable papers setting a record for a single transaction of documents relating to the 1916 Easter Rising.

In the same way that Americans hold any material relating to the Pilgrim Fathers in the highest esteem, so anything associated with Australia’s earliest European settlers carries a huge premium for its domestic market.

New York to hold liquor auctions

Maria Felix (1914-2002), born one of 16 children in the small Mexican town of Sonora, became an icon during the golden age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and was generally acknowledged as the most beautiful face in its history.

It was catalogued as Bow c.1760 but this English porcelain coffee cup seen at Bamfords of Derby on July 25 was identified as belonging to a much rarer class of porcelain associated with Charles Gouyn and a short-lived London concern in St James’s.

Half-yearly Paris figures to August showed Christie’s consolidating their lead with sales of €100.3m (£67.3m), nearly twice as much as their nearest rivals, ArtCurial.

This unusual 18th century bookstand or tray top commode, measuring 2ft 4in (71cm) wide, made a multiple-estimate £20,000 (plus 17.5 per cent buyer’s premium) at Dukes of Dorchester on July 26.

At any other sale the circumstances could have proved disastrous, but when the boat tent in the stewards’ enclosure in Henley-on-Thames flooded during The Henley Sale at Bonhams on July 21, things went swimmingly.

Majority of auctioneers and dealers breath sigh of relief, but other were not so fortunate.

High drama at the Chichester auction rooms of Henry Adams on July 19 when this pair of Chinese famille rose moon flasks shot to £760,000. The price, a house record, is also the fourth highest ever achieved in a UK auction room outside of London.

This summer has seen a spate of sleepers awoken in provincial salerooms, but inevitably the one that grabbed the headlines in the national press was the tale of the rediscovered ‘Titian’.

IT must be every trustee’s nightmare. You dispose of vanloads of unwanted books for what you think is a realistic £36,000, but then over a period of less than a year you see the pick of them then raise around £500,000 at auction.

When the Dorchester Fine Art saleroom Duke’s sold two rediscovered panels of Dominican saints by Fra Angelico for £1.7m, it was one of the best documented events outside the London rooms accompanied by months of pre-sale media coverage.

One of the quirkier and more unusual offerings to feature in Christie’s £3.7m sale of English furniture and works of art on June 7 was this rare Elizabethan map fragment, one of the first tapestries ever produced in England.