Auctions

A London street view by the northern English artist Harry Rutherford (1903-85) led the sale at Chiswick Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) on June 13.

Promoted in a catalogue issued by Fonsie Mealy (20/25% buyer’s premium) for its May 20 sale as something “for the collector who has (almost) everything”, an autograph section from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake was sold at €27,000 (£23,480).

Agatha Christie’s books were much in evidence at a Keys (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of June 7-8, among them a 1921 first of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

For more than 10 years after its donation, this Suffragette banner sat stowed away in a cupboard at a little charity shop in Leeds. On June 20 it sold at local saleroom Gary Don for £13,600 (plus 21% buyer’ premium).

Exactly a week before Harry Rutherford’s ‘Camden Town’ painting sold in London (see separate Art Market story this edition), a small undated sketch, Female Nude, by his prolific mentor and tutor Walter Sickert (1860-1942) cropped up in Kent.

'Tres Thomae…', by Thomas Stapleton, a leading Catholic theologian, is a set of three biographies of saints who shared his own first name. An exile from England, Stapleton was Professor of Theology at Douai at the time and his book was published there.

Last offered at auction at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1945, as part of the famed Bronson Winthrop collection, a drawing made by John Tenniel for Alice through the Looking-Glass made $16,000 (£12,600) at Sotheby’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on June 13 – though the saleroom had hoped it might make twice that sum.

Tiaras have enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years, particularly in Russia and the Baltic States where jeans and a diamond fascinator are de rigueur at informal high-society events.

It is high season for sales in Paris and the Drouot auction centre, home to 75 firms, is busy with its usual roster across all disciplines.

Indian design was a prolific influence in Carlo Giuliano’s style. Already seen at the 1851 Great Exhibition, interest in technicolour jewellery from the sub-continent rose to new levels when Victoria became Empress of India in 1876.

This rather unsettling woodcut illustration shown above, an almost surreal depiction of an amputation, is taken from from a 1515, Grüninger of Strasbourg edition of Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Das buch der wund Artzeny. Handwirkung der Cirurgia.

Like many who deal in antiques, the late dealer Andrew Cottrell zeroed in on his chosen niche with an all-consuming passion, accumulating vast knowledge (and stock) in the process.

This medieval gold posy ring with a Lombardic inscription is a type that was common in England and France in the 13th and early 14th centuries. After around 1350, Gothic script became popular.

Original D-Day invasion flags may be fragile and rare but a spate of them has appeared on the market recently in the US.

A well-provenanced collection of Beatles and other rock memorabilia will be a highlight in one of Butterscotch Auctioneers’ tri-annual estate auctions at its Bedford, New York, saleroom on July 16.