Print Edition

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

The summer season brought a raft of modern art sales to continental Europe and the various salerooms around Germany were no exception.

Handsomely bound, a set of Gould’s Birds of Britain offered as part of the small but select Dorros ornithological library at Christie’s New York sale of June 15 failed against a $60,000-80,000 estimate, but in a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of the previous day a very differently presented set brought a mid-estimate £36,000.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

Sporting guns are a little different from other areas of the arms and armour market in that many that are well over 100 years old are still in use today.

Works by the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers continued to outperform the rest of the Victorian art market during the latest round of sales in London.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

Decamping from the Big Smoke of London to the sunny beaches of a Caribbean island might sound like a happy daydream or at best, a holiday. But for Old Master specialist Theo Johns, relocating to the Dominican Republic represents a business strategy as well as a life change.

MADAM – I read with great interest Roland Arkell’s feature on collecting work by the Martin Brothers (ATG No 2226). Roland cites three exhibitions which he states are “landmarks” but leaves out perhaps the most important.

The big question… Is it important to your business to have an established, historic brand name?

“With the exception of Dürer’s Apocalypse, the most influential woodcut programme from Germany was that of the Cologne Bible of 1478-79.”

Bid to £5000 at Bonhams (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was a 1593 first of Thomas Fale’s 'Horolographia. The Art of Dialling'.

It has been 50 years since Sotheby’s first held its annual August sporting guns sales at the prestigious Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire.

Like many modern artists, John Bellany’s (1942-2013) canvases reflect his personal story – and his was a turbulent one.

More than 400 copper, tin and ceramic moulds, collected by the late antiques dealer Andrew Cottrell, were dispersed by timed auction at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) in Winchester on July 12.

Russ Withem has joined Morphy Auctions as a firearms expert in the company’s firearms and militaria division.

Austrian artists figured prominently at the June 20-21 sale at Kinsky (26% buyer’s premium) in Vienna.

The biggest sensation at Scheublein (26% buyer’s premium) in Munich on June 30 was caused by an oil painting of American Indians from the mid-19th century. It was an oil study for a famous painting by Carl Ferdinand Wimar (1828-62), who also went by the name of Charles Wimar.

Sold for €62,500 (£54,825) by German auction house Kiefer (20% buyer’s premium) in a June 30-July 1 sale in Pforzheim was an 1867, Hamburg first edition of the first volume of Karl Marx’s 'Das Kapital'.

Christie’s is weighing up options for the sale of the lease of its Old Brompton Road premises after it held its last sale before closing the popular South Kensington auction rooms.