Auctions

THE 300-LOT postal and online comic auction which ended on March 13 was a complete sell-out and saw a top bid of £2540 for a copy of the first Beano Book (or annual) of 1940, which had a rather worn spine but was otherwise designated vg.

The Scillies in one of 49 engraved charts from a 1753 first edition of Greenville Collins’ Great-Britain’s Coasting Pilot... which made £4000 at Bonhams.

Showing the Terra Nova at Cape Evans, this large, green toned carbon print is an example of the largest format photographs offered by the Fine Art Society in their 1913-14 exhibition of photographs taken by Herbert Ponting on Scott’s last expedition (this one measuring 2ft 6in x 23in – 75 x 58cm) and it sold for £5000 (Grigor Taylor) in the Bonhams Knightsbridge sale.

UK: Art imitates life in many ways – few stranger than this 1950’s pottery model of a Shetland Pony.

UK: INSET with a portrait miniature, this 1925 Golden Cockerel edition of Songs... by Robert Burns, illustrated with wood engravings by Mabel Annesley and bound in Cosway style in red morocco gilt by Bayntun Rivière, was sold at Bonhams (Buyer’s premium:15/10 per cent) at £1400 (Pirouages).

UK: Collectors and dealers will get a rare chance to bid for prints by pioneering photographers Roger Fenton and James Robertson, who made their names during the Crimean War, at an auction on behalf of a photographers’ charity on April 26 in central London.

FRANCE: The French provinces continue to be a rich source of high-level goods as proved by the sale of this 1760s table de milieu with exuberant ormolu mounts attributed to the Roman bronzier Luigi Valadier, plus a marble top set with semi-precious stones, to the Paris trade for Fr6.4m (£610,000, plus 10.865 per cent buyer’s premium), in the sleepy town of Narbonne, south-west France, on April 1.

UK: AS well as a quantity of letters, journals and sketch albums written or compiled by R.M. Ballantyne – among them an album containing sketches made on excursions to Scotland and fishing trips to Norway in the 1850s, which sold at £1000 to David Miles – the Bonhams (Buyer’s premium: 15/10 per cent) sale contained an 1858 first issue of Coral Island, the publisher’s decorative blue cloth binding slightly worn but generally good, which made £4000 (Heritage).

US: IT MAY be 25 years since a copy of the Elegy on Captain Cook, as “composed and and publickly recited before the Royal Academy of Florence” by Michelangelo Gianetti, was last seen at auction, and this 1785 Florentine first edition, engraved throughout and bound in contemporary calf, would also appear to be the dedication copy.

UK: THE PRINTED word and picture, rather than the familiar manuscript and ephemeral material, were to the fore in this smaller than usual Chichester sale, and just edging to the front of the price lists was a copy of the famous 1797 edition of Young’s ...Night Thoughts, as illustrated by William Blake.

The catalogue for the Dix Noonan Webb sale of March 21 makes known a recent discovery before it gets into the learned journals. It is an incidental use of sale catalogues that these things can be given prompt announcement. This is the nice example of a Charles I half-crown struck at York.

UK: LEVELS of demand at Bonhams & Brooks’ (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) March 22 sale of Modern and Contemporary British and Continental Art were less impressive than the Phillips event of March 20.

UK: JUST TO prove that “one can get a better... deal from the smaller boys”, John Cranwell, who trades in Oswestry as Bookworld and puts together two auctions a year for the local auctioneers, rang every Thomas Hardy specialist he could find in Sheppard's directory prior to this sale – determined that no-one with a declared interest should be unaware of the fact that a copy of Hardy’s third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, was to be offered in this 400-lot sale at the town’s Wynnstay Hotel.

THE BOOK section of this Worcester sale contained a good many equestrian titles, and while several seemed to be fairly modern and were job-lotted, what appears to have been the most important of these horse books was tacked onto a lot that led with an 1830 History of the Hundred of Carhampton in the County of Somerset by James Savage, and “three other books”.

UK: IT’S not just rose-tinted nostalgia – the old days really were more pleasant and these really are some of the toughest times the trade has known. The fact is that more dealers are chasing fewer lots at auction than ever before. Gloucestershire auctioneer Philip Allen has noticed a dramatic increase in private buying at auction in the past decade, which has obviously denied the trade much business, but what he has to say about the activity of dealers is even more depressing.

UK: STANDING head and shoulders above all other entries to this monthly sale in Sussex was a fine quality c. 1760 mahogany longcase clock by James Clarke of London.

Rightly described as ‘superbe’ this 28mm diameter portrait of Augustus made a slightly over-estimate E290 (£180).

This energetic charging knight of Philip the Good (1355-83) Count of Brabent (27mm diam.) could have been bought for E1250 (£775).

UK: THE subject matter of the Viking collection sold at Spink on March 14 speaks for itself. Not something to appeal to most Antiques Trade Gazette readers it is worth reporting briefly, mainly to demonstrate the skill that resides in London.

This 26mm diameter bronze of Brundisii (now Brindisi, and still a naval base in southern Italy) with, appropriately, a fine image of both Neptune and the boy on a dolphin, sold for E340 (£210).