Auction Reports

Better by a distance than nine similar items, a mid-17th century wainscot chair offered by Lawrences (25% buyer’s premium) in Crewkerne demonstrated the yawning price gap between the acceptable and the desirable in the early oak market.

Clock produced by Englishman influential in French horology impresses in Norfolk auction.

Private buying dominated as Essex saleroom Sworders (23% buyer’s premium) offered the selected contents of a Cotswold manor house.

Catalogued together with an incomplete silver propelling pencil with a bloodstone terminal, a silver Art Deco pocket lighter with a timepiece sold at £5200 (estimate £100-200) at Amersham Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) on July 11.

The personal enthusiasm of John Braund of Turpin’s Antiques, who died in January aged 90, was early oak and associated metalware.

Sold in the heartlands of English ceramics, this example, below, of Scotland’s finest was the estimate-shattering star of Potteries Auctions’ (20% buyer’s premium) July 13-14 sale in Stoke-on-Trent.

There’s no doubt that items from some of the ‘eureka’ moments in Victorian design are falling away from the collecting zeitgeist. The current fashion is undoubtedly towards the creative ideas of the second half of the 20th century.

Under forthcoming UK ivory legislation, there will be no legitimate market for bronze and ivory Art Deco figures.

A lot comprising 31 posters plugging top groups and festivals from 1969-72 was the major hit at Bellmans’ (22% buyer’s premium) Photographs, Posters and Prints sale.

The market for European ‘decorative arts’ – the wealth of late 19th and early 20th century ceramics, metalwork and design – has been in a constant state of flux since it first entered mainstream collecting in the late 1960s. As tastes evolve, so does pricing.

Penzance auction house David Lay (18% buyer’s premium) is no stranger to the great Chinese boom but in July it staged Cornwall’s first dedicated Asian sale.

Anglicised, Anglican and Tory landowners controlled many aspects of Welsh life in the Georgian period – particularly when it came to politics.

Pieces from the late 19th century, a vibrant but occasionally derided moment in the history of the decorative arts, provided many of the highlights to Sworders’ summer Fine Interiors sale in Stansted Montfitchet.

The demand for 1960s Pulcini glass birds made by Alessandro Pianon (1931-64) for the Venetian company Vistosi has spiked in recent months.

Visit by auctioneer to a regular auction-goer’s apartment uncovers Wedgwood collection.

Pleased as the vendors were to be told by Gloucestershire auctioneer Martin Lambert that a 1920s trunk from their late parents’ home could be worth £2000, they were happier when pre-sale interest in Tayler & Fletcher’s recent sale brought a revised estimate of £2500-4000.

An “extremely rare” grouping of military items including a British 1899 issue leather hobnail boot with a shrapnel hole sold for £6500 at a Buckinghamshire auction on July 3.

Just four months after identifying two tiny compositional drawings as the work of John Constable (1776- 1837) and selling them for close to £90,000, west London saleroom Chiswick Auctions struck gold again with a third ‘rediscovered’ landscape.

The classic ‘orange’ Pulcini glass bird is deemed the most common of the five designed by Pianon.

Saved at the last minute from a skip, a collection of Aboriginal weapons drew worldwide interest at Martel Maides’ sale in St Peter Port, Guernsey.