Auctions

AS its title suggests, the June 30 sale of scientific, medical and engineering works of art held by Christie’s South Kensington (19.5/12% buyer's premium) was something of a mixed bag. The 216-lot auction incorporated anything from 18th century microscopes and preserved amphibians to delft barbers’ bowls and scale models of locomotives.

KATE Dickens adored her father but found the situation at home after her parents’ separation to be intolerable and in 1860, desperate to get away, she entered into what was to prove a less than happy marriage to Wilkie Collins’ younger brother Charles.

THE 523-lot collection of theatrical souvenirs amassed by French actor and director Jean Darnel was 89 per cent sold by value at Piasa (20.33% buyer’s premium) on June 28, en route to a premium-inclusive €247,000 (£164,665). Thirteen lots were pre-empted by the Comédie Française and nine by the Bibliothèque Nationale.

IN recent years, clock dealers and collectors have adopted ever more exacting condition standards, preferring to wait and pay a premium for timepieces in untouched condition such as the highlight, pictured right, at Christie’s King Street (19.5/12% buyer's premium) on July 2.

REINFORCED at the spine with linen some time ago, the sale catalogue seen right was issued in 1836 by a Mr Pigott for a sale of farming stock, garden and other seeds, plus household furniture, held at Normandy Farm, near Ash in Surrey – the home of “the late William Cobbett, Esq. MP”, and of course author of Rural Rides. In a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of June 17, it was sold for £400 (C.R. Johnson).

ANOTHER of the top-priced clocks to feature at Christie’s King Street (19.5/12% buyer's premium) on July 2 was this Regency rolling ball skeleton timepiece pictured right, made in Edinburgh by Robert Bryson after the model by Sir William Congreve, the inventor of the rolling ball clock.

AS one of Keys of Aylsham's (10% buyer's premium) huge, six-a-year, sales aimed squarely at collectors, the strengths of this 1423-lot outing on June 17-18 lay in toys and militaria.

THE sale at $350,000 (£190,215) of Conan Doyle’s autograph manuscript of the Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire, has already been noted in the Antiques Trade Gazette (No.1646) but the Christie’s New York sale of June 9 that brought that very high bid also included the pair of first edition copies of The Adventures... and Memorials of Sherlock Holmes (1892 and ’94) seen right.

THE earliest book in English on the subject, John Stalker’s Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing... of 1688 has been described by H.D. Molesworth as “a work of art in its own right... as readily accepted for its literary content as for its technical information”.

PART of the large consignment of 18th century English porcelain from a local, mid-Wales private vendor, this 18th century underglaze blue painted Lowestoft cider mug, offered as the final lot in Brightwells’ Ceramics and Glass sale in Leominster on July 21, proved to be the star of the sale.

HAVING sold her four-storey town house on The Circus, one of Bath’s most prestigious Georgian streets, Dr Teri McGovern announced: “I’m on the move. I came with two suitcases and I’m moving out with two.”

ON July 14 there was a sale at Bonhams (incorporating Glendinings). The return of this appellation to their catalogues will please the sentimental because there is still world-wide affection for the Glendining name.

SOLD for £3800 as part of the June 21 Christie’s sale at Chirk Castle was a copy of the first and only published part of John Harris’ The History of Kent, bound in contemporary speckled calf, now rubbed and splits at the joints.

A LARGE scale oil by Kathleen Hale of Orlando Reclining Amongst Flowers failed to sell against a £10,000-15,000 estimate at Sotheby’s on July 8, but the autograph draft manuscript of Orlando (The Marmalade Cat) becomes a Doctor of 1944, right, each page with pencil and coloured crayon drawings (some with added wash or gouache, a few unfinished) did sell at £5000 to a London gallery.

THE very fine 1950 first edition copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seen right, with just a few nicks to the jacket skilfully repaired, was sold for £6000 to a collector by Bloomsbury Auctions on June 17, but at Sotheby’s on July 8, a complete set of the seven books that make up C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia was left unsold on an estimate of £5000-7000.

ILLUSTRATED right is a very good copy of the 1885 first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s splendid A Child’s Garden of Verses that made £1200 (Bauman Rare Books) as part of the Alan Fortunoff library at Bloomsbury Auctions on June 4.

ONE yellow-covered rabbit book in the Dominic Winter sale of June 24, a scarce 1922 first of Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit, or How Toys Become Real, with its William Nicholson illustrations, was left unsold on an estimate of £4000-5000 (the original pictorial boards had been “rebacked in facsimile”) but the 1972 first of Richard Adams’ Watership Down, seen right – a copy used in the V&A’s 1977 ‘After Alice’ exhibition – made £610 in Swindon.

A 56-sheet sketch book by Camille Pissarro, 8 x 11in (21 x 28cm), dating from his stay in Venezuela between April and August 1854, sold for €150,000 (£100,000) at Piasa (20.33/13.16% buyer's premium) on June 18.

THERE is never any shortage of news from the Hundred Acre Wood and this summer’s helpings included, at the very basic level, the straightforward 1926 first of Winnie the Pooh seen top right, a little rubbed and darkened to the spine, which brought a bid of £1350 (Sotherans) at a Dominic Winter sale of June 24.

THE pencilled Assumption (with white highlights), 20 x 15in (50 x 37cm), shown right, turned up at Doutrebente on June 25 with a €4000 estimate.