Front Page and News

Bonhams’ Oxford office is to reopen as a saleroom for two auctions in the autumn season.

Dealers from France and England contributed to a protracted bidding battle for a rare Renaissance maiolica dish offered at an auction house in Saxony.

Maidenhead auction house Dawson’s is to sell a collection of Martinware on behalf of descendants of an important patron of the Southall pottery.

Fair organiser Caroline Penman has abandoned her plan for retirement and will take on the running of the next Chelsea Antiques Fair – but at a reduced length.

A Bath museum hopes to acquire a rare hoard of coins found in a Chew Valley field that could be valued at £4m.

Many of the high prices achieved at last week’s ‘celebrity’ sale titled Bob Hawke & Blanche d’Alpuget: Mementos, Curiosities, Art and Design reflected the impact of souvenir hunters, anxious to own a reminder of Australia’s former prime minister who died earlier this year. But not all of them.

Purchased for £1 from a Hertfordshire charity shop earlier this year, a Qianlong famille rose wall vase will carry an estimate of over £50,000 at Sworders in the autumn.

A first edition of the most famous work in angling literature will be offered at auction in North Yorkshire.

Auction house Bellmans has announced the appointment of Samantha Dunn-Davies to head its new London office in Brook Street, Mayfair.

This copper-alloy Roman mask will be offered for sale on September 3 by TimeLine Auctions in London, estimated at £80,000-100,000.

Paul Viney, chairman of Woolley & Wallis and a 25-year veteran at the Salisbury saleroom, is handing over the role to colleague John Axford.

Defra has issued a fresh warning for the antiques trade on the import and export of CITES-listed natural history specimens ahead of Brexit.

An archive relating to a once famous Suffolk dynasty comes for sale at Sworders in Stansted Mountfitchet on September 10-11. The diaries, journals and letters of Lady Ann Cullum (1807-75) of Hardwick House near Bury St Edmunds form part of a Fine Interiors sale.

Hansons plans to hold auctions at all three of its venues after its purchase of the freehold of Bishton Hall in Staffordshire.

Brought into the Epping saleroom of the Bonington auction house with a collection of Moorcroft, this Florentine Mannerist bronze sold for £150,000.

Relatively few English spinets from the 17th century survive but one surfaced at a Criterion auction in Islington. Loosely catalogued and estimated at just £100-200, it made £5500 (plus premium).