Auctions

Antiquities dealers could find their trade in legally exported artefacts threatened despite due diligence if the Egyptian government succeeds in reversing Sotheby’s sale of a granite bust of Ramses II.

The Impressionist and Modern sales were not the only New York sales last week to smash auction records. Christie’s November 5-6 sale of 19th and 20th century prints brought an extraordinary record price for a single print by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. La Grande Loge, an 1897 lithograph in colours on wove paper, was an extremely rare and previously unrecorded colour trial proof produced before an edition of 12.

OF the three new world auction records taken at Christie’s Rockefeller Center saleroom on the evening of November 6, two of them were for pieces of sculpture. This follows on from Christie’s success in the May Impressionist and Modern sales, their best – as Sotheby’s were for them – for some time, when Constantin Brancusi’s 1913 bronze Danaïde took $16.5m (£11.6m), the highest price for any piece of sculpture sold at auction.

The 12th specialist textiles sale under the Rossini (17.342% buyer’s premium) hammer at Drouot on October 9 attracted keen trade interest, with 76 per cent of the 550 lots sold, yielding a hammer total of some €430,000 (£270,000).

GIVEN the fiscal disadvantages involved, Christie’s and Sotheby’s won’t usually be looking to Paris as a venue for sales of Modern art, but Christie’s (buyer’s premium 20.93%) had a modest French Collection of Post-Impressionist & Modern Paintings and Drawings on offer on September 28 that fared well enough, with 40 lots from 43 sold for a hammer total of €1.04m (£650,000) with seven per cent bought in by lot and just two per cent by value.

In May 1919 New Yorker Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize for the first non-stop aeroplane flight from New York to Paris. In the ensuing eight years dozens of people managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean by air, but no one met Orteig’s criteria until eight years later when on May 20-21, 1927 Charles A. Lindbergh made the longest non-stop, heavier-than-air transatlantic flight in his plane, the Spirit of St Louis.

The imminent sale at Bloomsbury Book Auctions this Thursday (November 7) will feature a late 15th century French illustrated manuscript of the most important treatise on hunting of the Middle Ages, shown right. Gaston Phébus’ Livre de la Chasse and Livre de l’Ordre de Chevallerie, illuminated manuscript on paper, bound in 17th-century calf, in modern morocco-backed cloth case is estimated at £250,000-300,000.

Auctioneers Walker Barnett & Hill (buyer’s premium 15 per cent) were understandably celebrating their decision not to break up the contents of WTM Snape’s Tea and Coffee Merchants of Queen Street, Wolverhampton, right, when they were put up for sale on September 30.

FINE ART buyers may recoil from bloodied dead game or memento mori skulls on still lifes, but the rest of the market knows no such delicacy. Death and disaster, after a suitable lapse of time, become marketing opportunities, as was demonstrated at the Chiswick rooms of Harmers (15% buyer’s premium) on October 22 when their wide reputation as philately auctioneers brought them the remarkable Günther Heyd Disaster Mail collection from Germany.

Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons was the venue on the evening of October 29 for the sale by Thomson, Roddick and Medcalf of four important and original wallpaper designs by William Morris (1834-1896).

Seen here are two black ink silhouettes of Teeterree and Thomas Tooi that sold for £2500 as part of the book and ephemera section of an antiques sale held on October 5 by Finan & Co. of Mere.

Few historic characters are guaranteed to generate more interest than the one-armed, one-eyed figure of Britain’s most celebrated admiral, Lord Nelson. Sotheby’s (19.5/10% buyer’s premium), Bond Street, 93-lot auction of Nelson memorabilia from the Alexander Davison collection sold on Trafalgar Day (October 21) to a room so packed that buyers had to spill over into an adjacent gallery.

The fastest growing area of the jewellery market, mourning apparel has become “hot property in the past 12 months”, says Jethro Marles of Bearne’s. Pointedly excepting the sort of heavy black jewellery produced in large quantities during the post-Albert period, he says that the material that has doubled in value over the past year is the earlier, more delicate mourning jewellery of the sort shown right.

The COINEX week of sales was kicked off by Dix Noonan Webb with a 1928-lot sale on a long October 8. This marathon took ten hours to disperse, making a total of £483,639; this, exults Chris Webb, was their best ever sale.

The second-eleven sale that followed on from Christie’s main Islamic auction, was held in their South Kensington rooms on October 18, with 324 of its 417 lots changing hands, and saw the highest take-up of all the sales in this autumn’s series.

Pick of the Bligh relics sold at Christies King Street last month was the cup that he used to hold his meagre rations of bread and water, a coconut shell that bears his incised initials, the date April 1789 and, inscribed in ink around the rim, the words “The Cup I eat my miserable allowance of”.

AMONG a number of more positive signs for the trade this autumn, fewer are more enouraging than news of an auction house expanding to accommodate extra consigments. Such is the case at these Devon auctioneers, S.J.Hales, who, since they opened in May 2000, have held monthly auctions at the local Edgemoor Hotel where space has meant sales have not exceeded more than 800/900 almost all aimed at ceramics collectors.

Presented with individual estimates of €35,000-50,000, two male and female Urhobo figures – just as large as the Urhobo figure sold at Sotheby’s, and possibly a matching pair – were the chief casualties at the mixed-provenance sale of African art (principally from Nigeria) assembled by Marie-Catherine Daffos and Jean-Luc Estournel for Lombrail-Teucquam (buyer’s premium 15%) at Drouot on the afternoon of September 30.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the market has undergone a slow but steady shift towards 20th century painting in particular the Post-War abstraction of the St Ives school whose geometric shapes and pure blocks of colour are wholly in tune with contemporary tastes.

Glittering personalities from the world of arts, they were the toast of Paris in the late 1960s. Capote and Sagan, Karajan and Nureyev, Callas and Saint-Laurent – their presence at soirées was coveted by the self-regarding hostesses across town, but they all paid homage to the ultimate hostess trolley when they arrived for dinner at 10 rue de Dragon.