Auction Reports

Historically the first major sale of the year, the January ‘furniture’ auction at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) turns eyes towards Salisbury for evidence of what the next 12 months will bring.

Dated c.1930, this Lenci figure of a girl in fashionable culottes, below, was estimated at £200-300 at Adam Partridge (20% buyer’s premium) but appears to have been spotted as one of the rarer products of the Turin factory.

The traditionally ‘dead’ period between Christmas and New Year was enlivened by the December 28 sale at Wotton Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) in Gloucestershire – to the extent that more than 20,000 people suffering withdrawal symptoms worldwide viewed it online and 1360 of them registered to bid.

The continued interest in Victorian music boxes in this age of Spotify and streaming was evident when three were among the 1500-lot sale held by Unique Auctions (17.5% buyer’s premium) to launch the new year.

Topped by the 17th century Dutch bottles at £30,000 (see ATG No 2375), the year’s first sale at Hannam’s (23% buyer’s premium) had other treasures among the 2000 lots including the French bronze figural torchères, right.

If the Battle of Britain is your collecting field, then the sale of a Kent collection held in late 2018 would have been a major draw.

The British Art Pottery sales at Woolley & Wallis have posted some remarkable sums for single William De Morgan tiles.

The drive by, among others, the Royal Academy and the National Gallery to promote women’s importance in art would have required little effort had campaigners looked at the world of modern ceramics.

Among the first women potters recognised by the public as individual designers worthy of collecting were Hannah Barlow (1851-1916) and her sister Florence. The first women artists at Doulton’s Lambeth factory, they joined in 1871 and 1873 respectively.

Christmas has little, if any, effect on collectors of vintage and antique toys, but that doesn’t stop auctioneers mounting festive season specials.

Topping a number of good pre-Christmas clock sales was a rare table/bracket clock, among the last made by London ‘Golden Age’ name Daniel Quare (1649-1724) with Stephen Horseman, who became his partner at the Exchange Alley workshop in 1721.

Three-day auction at Cumbrian saleroom demonstrates global reach of art and antiques.

Serendipity had it that three early pieces of European pottery and glass – two of them dated – were offered for sale across a trio of English regional auctions in a matter of days in December.

A fine example of a dirk, without which no Highland formal dresswear is complete, was among the stand-out lots at Cuttlestones’ (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale at Penkridge on November 22.

One of the more unusual corkscrews to come onto what is a fiercely competitive collectors’ market recently was a brass, steel and wooden contraption of the type one may have seen clamped to the bar of fin-de-siècle brasseries.

While five-figure sums for top-end 20th century design furniture are familiar in the international centres of New York, Paris and London, fewer pieces appear in the UK regional market.

While the market shows increasingly discerning tastes, quality definitely counts at auction.

Never out of fashion, the best furniture by Robert Thompson is going through one of its periodic surges – as evident at Wilkinson’s Doncaster rooms last month (ATG No 2369) and at Sworders of Stansted Mountfichet (ATG No 2363) in October.

High-priced luxury handbags and other luxury goods made the most money at Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) sale of Costume, Accessories and Textiles at Leyburn but collectors’ interest was more focused on a private collection of hat pins.

The two sewing boxes modelled as houses shown below were made for different markets but both had strong appeal to UK collectors.