Auctions

As experienced art dealers discussed the £95.6m sale of 233 new works by Damien Hirst (b.1965), it was the word 'celebrity' that cropped up the most to explain the phenomenal prices seen at the Beautiful Inside my Head Forever sale.

CHRISTIE’S have announced that their sale of the joint stock of the two London dealerships Hotspur and Jeremy will be at a dedicated auction at their King Street rooms on November 20.

PRE-COLOMBIAN art valued at €5m in total was withdrawn from sale in Paris on September 12 after the last-minute intervention of the Mexican Embassy.

This large three-section glass panel was designed and made by Paul Jefferies at the Whitefriars factory in 1966.

Phillips de Pury’s Hip Hop Crown Jewels auction scheduled for October 1 in New York has been postponed until March 5, 2009.

Following a confidential agreement between the parties involved, the Fatimid rock crystal ewer ‘sold’ for £220,000 at Lawrences of Crewkerne will reappear at Christie’s next month with an estimate of over £3m.

Spink are to offer a £1m Treasury Note. Dated London 30 August 1948, and printed with the red serial number 000008, it is one of only two surviving examples from the nine thought to have been printed in connection with the Marshall Plan.

In October, South London auctioneers Rosebery’s will be conducting their inaugural auction in St James’s.

Dreweatts are to begin holding sales again in Godalming, Surrey. The former Hamptons salerooms, acquired by The Fine Art Auction Group in 2005, have operated only as an origination and valuation office since January 2007 but will return to action on October 28 with a catalogue of silver and jewellery.

This rare medal by the Glasgow silversmith Robert Gray & Son from c.1807 commemorates a successful campaign of the previous year to resist imposition of duties on the local tobacco trade.

A gold pattern Chinese coin picturing Chang Tso Lin (1875-1928) was dubbed 'one of the rarest coins in the world' by A.H. Baldwin & Sons and Ma Tak Wo Numismatic Co Ltd who offered it for sale in Hong Kong on August 28.

Whilst perhaps better known for selling reclaimed building materials, T.W. Gaze of Diss in Norfolk consistently attract lots of a more decorative nature in their five architectural sales each year. Their August 16 sale included this very fine quality early 18th century marble study of a boy holding aloft a bearded mask.

A DIARY kept by a sailor in Nelson’s navy was offered for sale in a US auction earlier this month. Given that diaries kept by ordinary sailors are exceptionally rare, there was huge interest in this visually striking document from both sides of the Atlantic with institutions, the trade and private collectors vying for the journal.

Phillips de Pury are holding the first ever auction of hip hop jewellery on October 1 in New York. The sale, titled Hip Hop's Crown Jewels will offer some serious bling worn by some of the music movement's biggest stars.

Bonhams are to sell the contents of Great Brampton House, Herefordshire, home to the antiques business of long-standing dealer Lady Pidgeon. The sale will take place on October 1 onsite in the grounds of the estate and will feature over 700 lots of furniture, works of art, Asian ceramics and paintings.

THE Standsted Mountfitchet saleroom Sworders are to sell the contents of Lancotbury Manor, a timber-framed Tudor manor house near Dunstable that was the former home of David Cochrane and Bernard Gulley.

AT Sotheby's on July 17, a wooden file box containing nearly 4000 index cards compiled by the father of professional forensic pathology, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, sold at £15,000 to a collector.

A previously unheard tape of a Beatles recording session, in which John Lennon and Paul McCartney break into giggles and crack jokes, has fetched £10,000 at Cameo auctioneers in Midgham, Berkshire.