Cumbria

Two cased Stuart Devlin silver gilt surprise eggs of unique designs sold for £4400 at 1818 Auctions (20% buyer’s premium) in Milnthorpe on April 1.

In the proud tradition of UK provincial auction houses, the 2000-lot, three-day sale at Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium) offered a world of artefacts from way beyond its Lakeland base of Cockermouth.

A bound volume of early works on a famous automaton chess player, featured in ATG No 2387, was not the only lot in a recent Cumbrian sale to produce a handsome return.

A 23-year-old paratrooper’s account of escaping the Battle of Arnhem sold for £3200, over 10 times the top estimate at 1818 Auctioneers (20% buyer’s premium inc VAT) of Milnthorpe, Cumbria, on March 5.

Having stood in the George IV pub in Workington since the 19th century, a mahogany penny slot machine made its last public appearance at Cumbrian auction house Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium).

Sapphires have been mined in Burma (now Myanmar) for over a millennium, the stones admired for their colour saturation and dark hues.

If the Battle of Britain is your collecting field, then the sale of a Kent collection held in late 2018 would have been a major draw.

Three-day auction at Cumbrian saleroom demonstrates global reach of art and antiques.

This seasonal watercolour of figures ice skating in the Lake District (below) sold for a mid-estimate £3600 at local Cumbria saleroom Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium) on November 28.

Packed with job lots in many categories, the book section of a three-day antiques auction held at Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium) in the Cumbrian market town of Cockermouth heralded an intent to make such sales a regular feature.

Two contrasting marine scenes, encapsulating the unpredictable nature of the sea, were offered at a recent sale at Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium) of Cockermouth in Cumbria.

Pitched at £20-40, a small bisque doll with jointed limbs, below, topped Mitchells’ (20% buyer’s premium) toys sale at Cockermouth on July 21.

A ship painting by the artist regarded as the first great Trinidadian painter, Michel-Jean Cazabon (1813-88), surfaced for sale at Cumbrian auction house PFK earlier this month.

Two 1859 firsts of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species…, neither in what could be called good condition, made very strong prices in recent weeks. This is a book nowadays so desirable that such shortcomings can be overlooked.

“The best piece in the sale,” enthused auctioneer Richard Harrison in reference to a Meiji Kazaridana cabinet sold for £11,000 at Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium) at Cockermouth on June 13-15.

Running to just over a hundred pages and containing numerous illustrations of ships, figureheads and portrait busts, an accounts ledger kept by a Cumbrian shipbuilder has gone to a local museum.