Auctions

THOUGH not a first class copy, a 1632 edition offered as part of this first Bath sale of the year at Bonhams was still a highly desirable and scarce item and brought the day’s top bid of £17,000 from Maggs.

Good stock furniture dominated this 894-lot wide-ranging sale on 13 December at Heathcote Ball sourced from various private sources in Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

NOT the top seller at this 653-lot Suffolk sale at Abbotts on 19 December but interesting in that it sold at all, was a burr walnut Victorian davenport.

The final ceramics auction in London last year was the glass sale held at Sotheby’s Olympia on December 18. The top priced lot at £50,000 was this damaged but rare North German covered goblet of c.1675, painted and signed by Johann Anton Carli of Andermach am Rhein with a scene of Christ and the woman of Samaria.

The 102 lots of European ceramics that rounded off Christie’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) December 13 furnishing sale at King Street had, despite a degree of softness to the Meissen market, a generally high take-up for that factory, with 18 of the 25 lots of tablewares and figures changing hands and some strong individual results.

If 1930s Blackpool looks like a British version of the Italian Riviera it is because this poster advertisement, right, was designed by a Neapolitan watercolourist, Fortunino Matania, for the LMS railway company whose trains serviced the Lancashire resort.

USA : It was no surprise that the star lot in a star-studded Americana sale at Christie’s New York on January 18 and 19 was the Lafayette-Washington pair of saddle pistols which fetched $1.8m (£1,285,715) and established a new world auction record for a firearm.

IT CANNOT often be said of an auction catalogue that its lot numbers will be used for a very long time, perhaps a century or more, as reference numbers in a standard academic publication. The catalogue of Numismatik Lanz of Munich is just such a one.

CONTINUING the tradition of the old Phillips network, the Sevenoaks branch of new owners Bonhams moved to Ramster, the Surrey stately home for a winter event offering some of the better pieces consigned to the company’s various rooms in the South East.

“Fascism, charged with Idealistic values, is applauded by all of those who are legitimately able to call themselves Italian poets, novelists and painters. We are sure that in Mussolini we have the Man who will know how to value correctly the force of our Art dominating the world.”

SOTHEBY’S have given the autograph documentation and picture, right, a hefty estimate of €500,000-750,000 for a very good reason: the picture is now thought to be the earliest image made by photographic means.

PARIS: A prestige series of auctions held by Tajan at the Hôtel George V just before Christmas (December 17-19) yielded just under £7m hammer.

Villa Bombrini Sale: TWO days before their main mixed owner European furniture sale, Christie’s also offered a separate single owner auction – Furniture and Works of Art removed from Villa Bombrini, ‘Il Paradiso’, Genoa – on December 11. Just over 300 lots were offered, of which three quarters found buyers – selling to the tune of £1,134,280.

ARMS & ARMOUR: Academic importance doesn’t always equate with financial interest, but in the case of the item pictured here, a 16th century close helmet, which went under the hammer at Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on December 7, there was a happy concurrence between the two.

SPAIN: The real star of the Sala Retiro (16% buyer’s premium) main sale of the season, held on December 12 and 13 was a piece of silver, specifically a large, 153/4in (40cm) high silver lidded jug made in Spain in the first third of the 17th century.

STRONG private interest from well beyond the local area meant the trade, drawn mainly from the North and across the Border but also including dealers from Kent and as far as Holland, faced stern competition at this 1100-lot Cumbrian sale at Mitchells on 6-7 December.

A large collection of theatrical, character costumes and accessories provided the Canterbury rooms with an out-of-the-ordinary offering which attracted surprisingly wide interest.

Tattered and blackened, possibly by fire, this pair of William IV Gillows mahogany library chairs had been consigned by a local restorer to Willingham Auctions, near Cambridge, for sale on December 29.

FRANCE: A gilded and bleu céleste Louis XVI Sèvres cup and saucer, right, 51/2in (14cm) tall and known as the Gobelet Dauphin, sold over estimate for Fr260,000 (£24,800) at Piasa in Paris on December 7.

PARIS: This extraordinary 2ft 3in (69cm) showpiece entitled Christus Vincit, made by Joseph Chaumet for the 1900 Exposition Universelle, sold for Fr2.8m (£267,000) at Calmels-Chambre-Cohen on December 10.