Auctions

TOP read in a May 20 sale held by Freemans of Philadelphia was one of 90 sets of the 37-vol. ‘Memorial’ edition of the writings of Mark Twain published by Harpers in 1929, which, in original three-quarter crushed green levant morocco gilt and marbled boards, sold at $12,000 (£6820).

IF the Toguri collection’s £600,000 black and white baluster vase was a masterpiece of Cizhou art, the size, detail and ingenious use of the stone’s natural inclusions make this monumental black and grey water buffalo, offered in Sotheby’s Bond Street’s 127-lot mixed owner outing on June 9, a master class in jade carving.

OVER the years, the collaboration between Sotheby’s Sussex and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust has done much to fill in the gaps left by the lack of detailed company records of Coalbrookdale furniture, and the May sale at Billingshurst, which featured 86 lots amassed over a number of years by a dealer/collector, offered another opportunity to assess the market.

RARELY one to miss a commercial opportunity, from pub jugs to caviar pots, Henry Doulton’s potworks in Lambeth produced stoneware advertising novelties for many local businesses. There are, for example, a series of paperweights made for the Thames boat people carrying the names of the companies who commissioned them as gifts for their best clients.

THIS wucai dragon jardinière, third right, entered together with three routine pieces of 17th and 18th century Chinese blue and white (pictured with it), with pre-sale hopes of £900-1300, proved a sleeper and was the focus of an intense bidding battle between Hong Kong, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese dealers at Sotheby’s Olympia’s 387-lot outing on June 10.

THE quality of the Salisbury sales held by Woolley & Wallis (15% buyer’s premium) has been previously mentioned in these pages of late and the 470-lot May 10 event was a case in point. Billed as a furniture, clocks and works of art sale, there were highlights across the sections, including a William IV rosewood chaise longue with a wonderful scroll end at £3200 and a 10 1/2in (27cm) blue john urn with re-gilded ormolu mounts at £2600.

ALTHOUGH catalogued as a late 18th century fruitwood apple form tea caddy, this finely turned and carved 5 1/2in (13cm) high vessel sold by Biddle & Webb (15% buyer’s premium) on April 1 was more accurately a melon.

PICTURED here are four very finely-preserved 1950s Bassett-Lowke 0 Gauge clockwork locomotives that were offered by toys and arms and armour specialists Wallis & Wallis (15% buyer’s premium) of Lewes on May 4.

THIS walking stick, thought to have once belonged to John Adams, the longest surviving of the Bounty mutineers, will be on offer at Sworders' (15% buyer’s premium) Summer Country House sale on July 20-21. It is made from a vine found on Pitcairn Island, where Adams and eight of the other mutineers famously settled after landing there on January 23, 1790.

A FIRE that struck three storage warehouses in Vauxhall has damaged lots consigned to the classic car and automobilia auctioneers Coys for their July 3 ‘Jaguar Legend’ sale at Chiswick House.

RETRIEVED by a porter from a box of kitchenalia sent for sale from Northumberland, this early 18th century Staffordshire slipware mug proved the highlight of the sale conducted by H&H King of Carlisle on June 7.

FOUND lying face down in the attic of a local house, apparently unloved, the pastel portrait of a young girl reading a book seen right was the sleeper that awoke to a six-figure bid in an April 3 sale that gave Dennis Auction Service of Stewartsville, New Jersey, their first ever $1m sale total.

SPECIALIST firearms saleroom, Rock Island Auctions of Moline, Illinois, sold over 2800 lots for a total of $5.3m (£3m) in their April 17-19 event. Among the higher priced weapons were three prototype or experimental pistols by Mauser and Walther.

PICTURES in a May 19 sale held by Doyles of New York included a very large (6ft 4 1/2in x 4ft 1in (1.93 x 125m) oil on panel after Andrea del Sarto's Porta Pinti Madonna.

IN the 18th century, it was widely believed that meteorites found on Earth were pieces of the moon that had been blasted into space by volcanic eruption. We now know that almost all meteorites come from the asteroid belt and that it was the pummelling that the moon received in the early years of the formation of our solar system that allowed some chunks of moon rock to escape the moon’s gravitational influence and, periodically, find their way to Earth.

CONTENTS sales dominated the early May auction action in Belgium, and there were two more held in France later in the month. These were very different affairs – one offering an array of recently acquired furniture and objets d’art, the other being more in the “family heirloom” category.

TWO of the more successful lots from a May 14 sale of American and European pictures held in Boston by Skinners are seen here.

TWO BOX files of Ford manufacturers’ catalogues, advertising material and other ephemera of 1920s and ’30s motoring interest brought a bid of £1550 in a May 19 sale held by Thomson Roddick & Medcalf and the only other lot to reach four figures was a collection of some 370 postcards relating almost entirely to Ulverston and Furness.

IN a May 18 sale held by Tennants of Leyburn, a copy of the 1902, first trade edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, bearing a neat inscription that was added 90 years later, was lotted with a copy of Jack and the Beanstalk in English hexameters by Hallam Tennyson and illustrated by Randolph Caldecott [1886?] and sold for £1000.

DECORATED manuscripts known as fraktur, made in various parts of America but primarily associated with Pennsylvania’s German communities, are something very little known in Britain, but on the home auction scene they are big money spinners indeed, as the example from an April 24 Americana sale held by Freemans of Philadelphia shows.