Derby

Estimated at £40-60, a pair of puce decorated creamware plates sold for a surprise £2000 at Bamfords (21% buyer’s premium) in Derbyshire.

Two plates from a Minton dinner service designed by Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52) for his personal use appeared for sale in Derbyshire last week.

Among the more unusual recent lots at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) was an early Victorian table carved from parrot coal.

Most angles on the collecting spectrum were covered in Bamfords’ (24.75% buyer’s premium) three-day autumnal catalogue.

A Bamfords (20% buyer’s premium) sale included this 3¼in (34cm) tall Chelsea figure from the Red Anchor Senses set created by the Low Countries sculptor Joseph Willems (1710-66), in c.1755.

The 1702 Accession of Queen Anne medal is not uncommon in copper and silver but very rare in gold.

Economic stimulus packages are not a new phenomenon. Georg Siegmund Stobwasser (1717-76) was among the many craftsmen attracted to the Brunswick by the special privileges granted them in the city by Duke Karl I (1713-80) in the wake of the Seven Years’ War.

The best-known press-moulded models made by John Derbyshire at the Regent Road Flint Glassworks in Salford are the series of animal and figural paperweights made in frosted, flint and coloured glass.

The lockdown may have reduced the number of UK auctions taking place but buyers have been looking more eagerly for opportunities at those events that have been staged.

This 8½in (21cm) Delft blue and white tulip vase below is typical in style and form of the De Metale Pot (The Metal Pot) factory.

A monogram and faint signature to a botanical study sold at Derbyshire saleroom Hansons (20% buyer’s premium) revealed it to be the work of celebrated Australian artist Sidney Nolan (1917-92).

Jaguar Fairs is launching a new biannual two-day antiques, collectors’ and vintage fair in Derby with the first to be held on Saturday and Sunday June 8-9 at the Derby Conference Centre.

Following the fall of Louis-Philippe in the 1848 revolution, the French royal sculptor Henri Joseph Francois, Baron de Triqueti (1804-74) was obliged to cast his net further afield for new patrons.

Lovely bunch of blooms? A closer look reveals Irish Quaker’s conchological talent...

It was a British engineer, Robert Whitehead (1823-1905) – working in Austria at the instigation of the Austrian Navy – who developed the first self-propelled torpedo in the 1850s.

Just a month after the Second World War, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was in Paris working at the lithography workshop of Fernand Mourlot (1895-1988). It was the beginning of a collaboration that would last almost three decades and produce more than 400 different graphic images and editions.