Auctions

USA: The annual general sale of good quality classical coins (446 lots) hosted by the triumvirate of Baldwins (London), Markov (New York) and M&M (Washington DC) took place in the Big Apple on January 17.

FRANCE: Camard reported “strong progress” in demand among trade and private buyers for 20th century ceramics last year. They returned to the field this year when they offered a “panorama of 100 years of history of ceramics” at Drouot on January 25.

FRANCE: TOBACCOLOGY may not be the word on everybody’s lips in these smoke-free days but it was the official theme of the offbeat sale held by Rieunier-Bailly-Pommery at Drouot on January 28.

BOOKS played a fairly minor part in the first Newbury antiques sale of the year at Dreweatt Neate on 30 January – one that raised in excess of £1.5m, a record for the Berkshire saleroom – but they did get the proceedings under way, and the very first lot in the catalogue, a misbound and now disbound and browned copy of Love in a Village, a comic opera as performed at The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden... showed the way in selling for a double estimate £200.

In 1805, William Blake was commissioned by Robert Harley Cromek to make a set of 40 drawings to illustrate Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, 20 of which Cromek proposed to have engraved by Blake.

FRANCE: Pictured right is a restored 18th century two-part fountain basin, with a veined red marble shell topped by a white stone lion head, which sold over expectations for €25,000 (£15,500) at Tajan on January 30

Anyone looking at this small 19th century still life painting, right, for the first time could be forgiven for rubbing their eyes with disbelief to hear that East Sussex auctioneers Gorringe’s (15% buyer’s premium) had allocated it an estimate of £20,000-30,000 at their January 29-31 sale in Lewes.

Rise of Winifred Nicholson goes on apace with amazing bid of £100,000 for portrait of Ben: Over the last two or three years Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981), the first wife of Ben Nicholson, has become an increasingly significant figure in the Modern British market, culminating in the record £52,000 paid last July at Phillips for one of her trademark window still lives.

Buying art as an investment has always been a perilous business. Back in the 1920s during the so-called Etching Boom speculating collectors were prepared to pay hundreds of pounds – ie more than the price of an average London house – for single prints by ultra- fashionable artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey.

The Wiltshire rooms Woolley & Wallis usually hold four specialist carpet sales a year but a fifth was squeezed in before the scheduled Valentine’s Day event, and with a 77 per cent rate and £77,000 total on the 284 lots on offer, the decision by specialists June Barrett and Ian Bennett was more than justified.

A privately sourced collection of jewellery boosted this first dispersal of the year in these Hampshire rooms at George Kidner on 9 January – “the bulk of the rest of the material was just good stock pieces”, said auctioneer Andrew Reeves.

THIS first sale of the new year at the Staffordshire rooms Richard Winterton attracted a number of new buyers who were all in the area for the LAPADA fair at the nearby Birmingham NEC.

London’s first costume and textile sale of the year took place at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) at the end of January, the 318 lots netting just over £150,000 with an 87 per cent take-up by lottage, 89 in money.

The London art market received a major lift in the salerooms last week when Sotheby’s and Christie’s attracted remarkably strong levels of international demand for their February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary auctions.

The estimate of £25-35 placed on a second impression copy of Tolkien’s The Hobbit was a reflection of its condition – “deplorable” being the cataloguer’s chosen epithet. There was no jacket and 20-30 leaves had been torn loose, one of which had been further torn into four (now three) pieces.

FRANCE: FRANCIS FRITH (1822-98) was the focus of attention of Beaussant-Lefèvre’s sale of 19th century photographs at Drouot on January 25, as expert Pierre-Marc Richard claimed a world record auction price of €23,000 (£14,400), almost double-estimate, for a Francis Frith photograph: an 1858 view of The Pyramids of El-Geezeh from the south-west (pictured).

THE LAST 450 or so lots of a two-day general antiques sale on 6 December at Cheffins, Cambridge comprised books, many of them multiples.

FINLAND: While they would not look out of place in the William Morris Museum or in Hill House Helensburgh, two silvered brass candlesticks in this sale had never left Finland. They came up for auction at Helsinki auction house, Hagelstam (12% buyer’s premium) on December 1 last year, where they had been catalogued with an estimate of FiM50,000/€8410 (the fale was conducted in Finnish Markk.

ONE of the more successful entries in this end of year sale at Comic Book Postal Auctions brought Christmas cheer to the Friends of St. Matthews School in Yiewsley, whose fund raising activities had brought in a large quantity of books, comics and annuals.

Last summer Christie’s Old Master drawings expert Nicolas Schwed was sitting at his desk in Paris checking through his e-mails when he came across this 460-year-old face staring back at him from his computer screen.