Auctions

UK: THE biannual sale of ceramics, glass, Oriental wares and decorative arts at Phillips’ Midlands operation saw keen enough trade and private bidding to produce a £138,000 sale total with a very respectable 82 per cent sold by lot.

The two letters IF are the initials of this mug’s owner, but IF could equally be read as an expression of desire, of conditional optimism, when you realise why the mug was made.

UK: If proof were needed that it is collector’s silver that is the most desirable category of ware in today’s market one could have had no better example than the sale held by Bonhams & Brooks (15/10% buyer’s premium) last Thursday, July 5. This 261-lot auction was especially strong on vertu and collectors items swelled by a number of private collections.

FRANCE: There was plenty of auction activity, but few front-line prices, in Lyon in June.

Everyone dreams of coming across a real gem at a car boot sale and this was the story behind a privately entered 19th century micro-mosaic oval panel in this Wotton Auction Rooms Gloucestershire sale on June 12-13.

UK: The white marble form of Cara, the Marquess of Breadalbane’s Venetian Greyhound, was the focus of bidders at Lyon and Turnbull’s sale in Edinburgh on June 30. Royal sculptor Peter Turnerelli (1774-1839), famous for his full-length statue of George III in state robes, modelled the 2ft 2in (65cm) high statue for the Park Lane apartment of the Breadalbanes, and invoiced the Countess for £210 in February 1811.

MAINTAINING their policy of high-content, budget priced sales, the Norfolk auctioneers Keys put up a bumper June offering with a 1540-lot antique sale on June 26 and 27 following a 1236-lot collectors’ sale on June 14. Occasionally there emerges a high-priced star at these antiques offerings but in the quieter days of summer the best bid came for a Georgian-style pedestal birdcage supper table, 3ft 1in (94cm) which sold at £2450.

THE 1140 lots of arms and armour held offered by Birmingham specialists Weller & Dufty (15% buyer’s premium) on June 13 encompassed most forms of dealing out death and sparked enthusiasm from a range of collectors and dealers. But the pick of the day was this fine cased pair of 18-bore flintlock duelling/officers’ pistols.

UK: Sold for £48,000 to Quaritch at Christie’s on June 4& 6 was a recently rediscovered manuscript of William Gilpin’s book on Forest Scenery... (first published in 1791) that fills four volumes and contains 25 full and 20 half-page watercolour drawings by Gilpin, plus three pencil and wash drawings of animals by his brother Sawrey.

An incomplete copy of one of the masterpieces of English botanical illustration of the 19th century, Mrs Edward Berry’s Selection of Hexandrian Plants (1831-34), offered at Christie’s on June 4 & 6 contained only 45 (of 51) of the younger Robert Havell’s partially colour-printed and hand-finished engraved and aquatinted plates, but it brought a bid of £60,000 from the Oppenheimer Gallery.

BOUND in contemporary half morocco, one of 300 signed copies of the 1907 first edition of Rothschild’s Extinct Birds, containing 49, mostly chromo plates after Keulemans, Lodge, Grönvold, Smit and Frohawk, went at £3000 to a collector in the Sotheby’s sale of June 5.

USA: A Philadelphia mahogany Chippendale games table, that represented the discovery of a lifetime for a small Massachusetts auction house, was bought by New York City firm Israel Sack Inc. for a massive $1.2m ($1.32m including the 10 per cent buyer’s premium) on June 4.

Recent documentary evidence suggests that the lithographic stones for the 79 plates by Smit and Keulemans after Joseph Wolf that illustrate Daniel Giraud Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasanidae or Family of Pheasants were destroyed after only 150 copies had been taken.

A sale of more than 400 lots at Phillips, Leeds on June 5– of which 80 per cent sold bringing a total of £122,000 – gave dealers and collectors from as far away as America and Australia an opportunity to assess the middle range of collectable glass and ceramics.

The Foot and Mouth crisis put an end to the intended group selling of Imperial weights and measures belonging to the British Trading Standards Association. The weights have now been sold over a number of general antiques sales at the Burton-on-Trent rooms of Richard Winterton (10% buyer’s premium) the latest of which was held on May 23.

Garden statuary is now an accepted part of the antiques market, but what about plants and trees? Auctioneers are prepared to sell anything that can remotely be classified as collectable these days, but there is a genuine case for admitting bonsai trees – works of art organic and antique – to the salerooms.

LIKE many other provincial auctioneers, the Bath operation of the Phillips empire – now the centre for collection points at Cardiff, Bristol and Sherborne, profited from the major fairs in June when their 332-lot sale on May 21 saw a take-up of 83 per cent and a predominance of trade buyers buying to sell on in London.

Foot and Mouth continues to ravage the businesses of Cumbria, but local private buyers and dealers had the capital to make a sizeable contribution to this monthly sale on the county’s west coast at Mitchells, Cockermouth.

UK: STANDING out from all the three-figure bids at this 412-lot dispersal at D.M Nesbit & Company on June 13, the £1000-plus results again underlined the trade’s willingness to fork out only on what dealers believe will sell quickly.

For last November’s Asia series Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) switched from holding mammoth mixed Oriental offerings to more specialised separate Chinese and Japanese sales – an arrangement they continued for the summer Asian sales last month.