Auctions

LARGELY unknown outside the world of harpists, the name of the celebrated Dublin maker John Egan is guaranteed to tug at the heart and purse strings of aficionados when one of his harps makes a rare appearance for sale as this one, right, did at the February 25 collectors sale held by Aylsham auctioneers Keys (15% buyer’s premium).

BOUND volumes of Manchester United home match programmes from the 1950s seasons were the best sellers in the football section of a sporting memorabilia sale held by Bonhams Chester on January 28, with prices ranging from £520 to £1300 for the volume covering the 1957-58 season that brought the devastating Munich air disaster.

ALTHOUGH Oriental pieces were the main strength of Woolley & Wallis’s (15% buyer's premium) quarterly specialist ceramics sale on February 25, there was also evidence of the continued strength of the market for unusual examples of early English porcelain.

“Probably the best sale of this type in a very long time. Very strong across the board,” enthused specialist Roy Bolton after his February 27 auction of Old Master Pictures at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyers premium).

WITH collectors’ taste in Modern British art shifting in recent years from pre-war to post-war, the once all-conquering Newlyn School has not generated as many headline-stealing results as it did in the late 1980s.

Setting a new house record at Carmarthen auctioneers Peter Francis on March 9 was this 18th century Coromandel Coast marquetry inlaid padouk, ebony and ivory chest of five short and two long drawers.

Signed and inscribed by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this short poem called ‘Fancy in the Clouds: a Marine Sonnet’ was written on a piece of seaweed and sent to Charles Lamb.

NATURAL history auctions usually throw up some fascinating lots, from bugs in amber to fossilised fish, from meteorites to a range of precious and semi-precious rocks, and the January 11 sale held by I.M. Chait, in association with David Herskowitz, was no exception.

NONE of the February auctions in Brussels were timed to coincide with the Foire des Antiquaires de Belgique (Belgian Antique Dealers’ Fair), staged from February 6-15, perhaps because this was the first year that the new-look fair had attracted such international attention.

FOR arms collectors, there is a magic to the name Colt and when a rare model in fine condition comes on to the market success is almost given.

ALTHOUGH the market for Clarice Cliff appears to be going through one of its periodic troughs, a private collection coming up for sale still virtually guarantees wide interest.

CONTENTS from one of Galway’s best-known properties will be sold at an unusual auction later this month.

SOLD at Sotheby’s (20% buyer’s premium) for £10,500 on December 9 was a copy in modern limp vellum of the Epigrammata of Joan Latinus, a work that praises John of Austria for his recent victory over the Turks at Lepanto.

BONHAMS Knightsbridge (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) Science and Marine outing on February 25 was hardly awash with blockbuster entries, but their disappointment at not selling John Gould’s cased display of humming birds (estimated to fetch £30,000-50,000 but bought in at £12,500 despite pre-sale collector interest) was somewhat allayed by the healthy bid placed for this Victorian octagonal double-cased shell Valentine (shown here).

AT 1620 lots, the January 27-28 sale held by Keys (10% buyer’s premium) at Aylsham, was a little smaller than many of the Norfolk rooms’ mammoth events but it followed a familiar pattern. Speedy selling of two- and three-figure pieces was supported by a handful of better offerings selling into four figures.

DEALERS are always looking out for a seriously undercatalogued lot and at Amersham Auction Rooms (15% buyer’s premium) on February 5 they found one.

This Kangxi period (1662-1722) blue and white porcelain brushwasher was a cut above other entries in Stride & Son’s (15% buyer’s premium) 1007-lot Chichester outing.

WITH thousands of middle-class homes being turned into white boxes every week, how on earth can English auctioneers sustain the market for middle-of-the-road Victorian pictures?

This pair of early 19th century mahogany and brass-bound peat buckets soared to £68,000 plus 19.5% premium – six times their estimate – at Bonhams’ March 2 fine English and Continental furniture sale in Bond Street.

IN April 1912, Miss Lenox-Conyngham was travelling with three relatives from Southampton to Cherbourg, but though this was just a short channel crossing, she decided that it was worthwhile dashing off a letter to a nephew on the ship’s notepaper.