Auctions

If, as a recent opinion poll has suggested, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the greatest-ever Briton, and Mouton-Rothschild’s 1945 vintage is, as Michael Broadbent described it in his Great Vintage Wine Book, “a Churchill of a wine”, is Mouton-Rothschild ’45, ergo, the Greatest Ever Wine?

Captain John Smith’s A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony... , the first printed account of the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 – or, “the first permanent English colony in the New World, and hence the direct progenitor of the United States”, to quote Boies Penrose – is one of the legendary rarities of early Americana.

Inspired by the catacombs of Somerset House, the street lighting of Pall Mall and, above all, the Babylonian splendour of the new Houses of Parliament, artist John Martin’s 1841 oil on canvas Pandemonium was an apocalyptic vision of Victorian London that played well to the post-September 11 sensibilities of the US picture trade at Christie’s King Street sale of the Forbes collection on February 19-20.

When it comes to wall power there is nothing like a poster to add presence and focus to an interior, and for iconic or cult status, a film poster is hard to beat.

IF THERE is one objet d’art that best characterises the antiques market at present it is the curate’s egg – good in parts, but bad overall. The flawed ovum’s brighter regions encompass most low-value collectables – ceramics included.

The Red House, the former home of designer William Morris acquired last month by the National Trust, is due to open to the public in Bexleyheath later this summer. But aficionados of the Arts and Crafts movement who cannot bear to wait that long should take a look at the Clarke Gammon sale in Guildford on February 25, where the residual contents of the Victorian house are being dispersed.

NEW YORK: THE North American linkage between gardens and antiques – one some English dealers have benefited from – reaches new heights from February 20 to 23 when New York-based Stella Show Management mount a fair dedicated to outdoor collectables.

Coming up in Lincoln: “ENGLAND expects every man to do his duty.” Nelson’s famous command was to be his last and effectively signalled the end of the Battle of Trafalgar. Details surrounding the start of the campaign are much more sketchy, but on February 20 Lincoln auctioneers Thomas Mawer & Son will be offering a memorandum written by Nelson to launch the famous battle.

The first furniture sale of the year at Sotheby’s Olympia (20/12% buyer’s premium) was a 272-lot gathering on January 14 which saw two-thirds of the contents change hands.

To date this year Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) have held five sales of furniture and carpets. These weekly sales are making a return to their Knightsbridge rooms for the first time in around 20 years after a recent peripatetic period of moving from Chelsea – their long time abode – to Bayswater and briefly back to Chelsea again.

BESWICK is one of the strongest areas of the 20th century collectable ceramics market so it was not surprising to see trade and private collectors packing these Leicestershire rooms at Gildings to bid on a large single-owner collection from a local deceased estate. What was surprising were the lengths to which bidders would go.

The Spring Fine Art & Antiques Fair at Olympia, which will be held in London from February 25 to March 2, has received a record amount of publicity thanks to this Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) portrait of Churchill, right.

TIME waits for no man, the saying goes, and clients of Abraham-Louis Bréguet were certainly reminded of this fact when paying their monthly instalments to the Swiss-born watchmaker for Souscription pocket watches like this example right which featured at Woolley & Wallis’s sale on January 29.

AT a time when several categories of London picture sales are struggling to achieve selling rates of 50 or 60 per cent, marine pictures appear to be one area with a rich enough client base to ride the current global financial storms.

It was a definite case of first the bad news, then the good news at the February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales in London. While Impressionist and Modern works failed to sparkle, there was a significant surge in interest for the Contemporary.

CHRISTIE’S have negotiated the sale of a major collection of watercolours of Greece by Edward Lear to the nation in lieu of tax. The 32 pictures come from the estate of the late Sir Steven Runciman and are expected to go the National Galleries of Scotland.

Wiltshire auctioneers Finan & Co., have carved out a niche for themselves by steering clear of brown furniture and 19th century porcelain and offering slightly more exotic fare.

Twenty one lots in Bonhams’ marine sale on January 22 came from the collection of the late John Foster, celebrated yachtsman and yachting enthusiast. The bulk of these were paintings but there were also three non-pictorial entries: a pair of carved wooden Prince of Wales feathers from Edward VII’s yacht Osborne, which fetched £1100, and the two silver racing trophies pictured here, which represented significant mementoes of racing history from both sides of the Atlantic.

It’s QUESTIONABLE how much influence a piece of furniture could have upon the writer using it, but certainly when the writer in question is Graham Greene, a writer of that fame can certainly influence the fate of a piece of furniture.

In November of last year this documentary Chamberlain’s Worcester ‘D’ shaped bough pot and cover sold at a West Country saleroom to a private collector and sometime dealer for £2700.