Auctions

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.

FREQUENTLY, the most interesting object in someone’s garage is not the car.

France’s share of the global auction market fell by 5.8 per cent in 2006, warns the Conseil des Ventes, the national auction watchdog, in its annual report published on June 25. Worldwide auction activity, it says, rose 34 per cent over the same period.

The date of 1623 puts this timekeeper firmly in the first years of production of what has come to be known as the English lantern clock.

In 1914, Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) was living in Cornwall and enjoying the most fertile period of her career.

On June 12, John Still, a private collector from Edinburgh, walked along a deserted Bond Street to arrive at the doors of the Fine Art Society at 6am, just a minute ahead of a second enthusiastic collector.

IT’S not often that eight sheets of paper bring out eight telephone bidders, but that was the case at Mallams’ sale in Oxford on June 8. Yet these were no ordinary scraps. They were, in fact, important pieces of architectural history.

JAMES Podger is to close his Great Grooms antiques centre at Dorking and concentrate all his efforts and resources on consolidating his Great Grooms centre at Hungerford, Berkshire.