Auction Reports

A Victoria Cross group awarded to a British soldier who volunteered to carry a vital message to a stranded platoon at Mericourt in October 1918, in the knowledge that five of his comrades had already been in killed in turn making earlier attempts, sold for £200,000.

Armorial head linked to the palaces of Henry VIII when he was married to Anne Boleyn.

South London auction house Roseberys (25% buyer’s premium) was instructed to sell the collection of Herbert Kennard on March 26.

Not to be confused with the modern Peter Rabbit series by Wedgwood, much scarcer teawares were made by the Grimwade’s factory in the 1920s.

Original photographs of a well-known Pre-Raphaelite beauty – the muse of William Holman Hunt and the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell – sold for £2600 at Sworders (25% buyer’s premium).

Estimated at just £100-200, a rare automaton of a stereotypical Chinaman smoking an opium pipe sold for £7400 at McTear’s (24% buyer’s premium).

The best known of the decorators who worked at Aynsley in the 20th century is the flower painter Joseph A Bailey.

Two English Orientalists made the biggest impression at a recent sale at Gorringe’s (23% buyer’s premium) in Lewes.

The name ‘peg tankard’ comes from the vertical row of pegs inside that can be used to measure the amount of alcohol drunk as it was passed around a table.

The sale of Islamic Art & Antiquities at Roseberys London (25% buyer’s premium) on March 31 included this New Kingdom yellow quartzite shabti fragment.

The West as well as the East made a major contribution to the success of Gorringe’s £1m sale on March 30 where, overall, 86% of the 593 lots sold.

Estimated at £60-80 but sold at £11,500, this set of 14-point deer antlers provided Martel Maides (17.5% buyer’s premium) with a sensational result.

When Cecil Beaton photographed the Wyndham-Quin sisters in 1950, he chose to copy both the setting and poses used 50 years earlier by John Singer Sargent in The Wyndham Sisters.

Michael Harris signature piece sells well at auction alongside Louis Osman silver spoons set

This particular form of English delft puzzle jug, with its distinctive knopped neck, seems to be peculiar to the second half of the 17th century.

With hindsight, the boast made by the Flying Steam Company – 'To China in Twenty-Four Hours Certain' – was a tad ambitious.

Experiments with porcelain at the Swansea factory began in 1814 with the arrival of William Billingsley and Samuel Walker from the Nantgarw China Works.

The work of French designer Fred Brouard (1944-99) is not uncommon at sales in France and the US but seldom appears at auction in the UK.

Peter Closon (c.1594-c.1662) was one of the most prolific of the so-called First Period lantern clock makers – although little is known about his life.

Although catalogued simply as ‘a 19th century Art Nouveau glass’ and estimated at just £30-50, a letter that accompanied this rare wine glass gave a clue to its origins.