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.

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.

“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.

Like many businesses scarred with bomb damage in post-war Britain, Lyons teashops were in need of cheering up.

Topping Mitchells’ (20% buyer’s premium) £53,000 Country Sporting sale in Cockermouth was an artist’s box belonging to George Lodge (1860-1954).

The world of Chinese art remains open to collectors on modest budgets if they look to some of the less fashionable wares, those from later periods and pieces that carry damage.

Something of a rarity, To Iceland in a Yacht appears to have no other auction appearances to its name. It was privately printed in Edinburgh in 1873 for its author, the chemist Robert Angus Smith (1817-84), a man best known for his work on air pollution and his identification of what later came to be known as acid rain.

Holker Hall, the privately owned country house in Cumbria, hosts its first fair in nearly 25 years this month.

Another classic piece of English furniture to go well above expectations was a Regency mahogany window seat in the style of George Bullock offered by the Cumbrian firm 1818 Auctioneers (17/12% buyer’s premium).

‘Stage Coach Passengers passing Woburn Sands’ is one of 100 coloured engraved caricatures after Isaac Cruikshank that illustrate GM Woodward’s Eccentric Excursions or Literary and Pictorial Sketches in England and South Wales, interspersed with Curious Anecdotes of 1807.

Appearing to be as vividly coloured as when it was made in the 18th century, a brocaded silk robe à l’Anglaise breathed the style and quality associated with its Spitalfields makers.

Catalogued as early English, this slipware dish above had all the qualities of the combed decoration earthenware baking, or loaf, dishes produced in the late 18th to early 19th century and took the top price at Mitchells (20% buyers premium) of Cockermouth.

Mitchells’ (20% buyer’s premium) Vintage and Antique Toy Sale on July 15 included a collection of 15 Rowntree’s sweet tins from the Edwardian era.

Standing by the stairs of a modest Cumbrian seaside home, a pair of 19th century treen figures dominated the sale, both physically and in price terms, at 1818 Auctions (20% buyer’s premium inc VAT) at Milnthorpe on June 6.

Consigned from a deceased estate, a 19th century oil of a popular Venetian view topped Mitchells’ (20% buyer’s premium) June 1 auction in Cockermouth, Cumbria.