Scotland

Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull have been named among the runners up in the Bank of Scotland £25m Entrepreneur Challenge, a national competition designed to identify and support excellence in businesses.

Bonhams have announced the appointment of a new managing director of Scotland and confirmed that new premises have been found in Edinburgh.

THE National Museum of Scotland have announced that they are to host the largest exhibition of Scottish silver ever seen.

FOUR men, including two lawyers, arrested in a police raid in Glasgow to recover the Leonardo da Vinci stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, have now been charged in a Scottish court.

IT was the first war painting by a Scottish artist to be exhibited in Scotland and was extensively discussed in the Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers of January 1941.

This 18th century needlework panel appears to be a fragment of a work conceived on almost Bayeux Tapestry proportions.

The Art Fund have thrown their weight behind the campaign to save Dumfries House for the nation with a £2m pledge towards acquiring the house and its contents. Christie’s, who are due to sell the contents at a showpiece sale next month, say such good intentions have arrived too late.

The highlight of the English and Continental furniture and objects sale conducted Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh on March 21 was this walnut, rosewood veneered, satinwood crossbanded and parcel gilt side table c.1805.

FOR the third successive year, dealers from the UK’s two major antiquarian bookselling organisations, ABA and PBFA have combined forces at the Edinburgh Book Fair which this year takes place on March 23 and 24 in Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms.

THOMSON Roddick Scottish Auctions have relocated to a new modern saleroom in Dumfries after holding auctions in Annan for over 100 years and also at the Easterbrook Hall.

Dublin and Edinburgh rooms all but double sales totals as Bonhams raise stakes in Scotland

Weighing 1.5 tonnes, Eduardo Paolozzi’s (1924-2005) Master of the Universe is winched into position outside the Edinburgh saleroom of Lyon and Turnbull. The sculpture, one of an edition of four, provided the highlight of the auctioneer’s first Contemporary Art Sale on September 1, selling to Edinburgh gallery Bourne Fine Art on behalf of a client at an artist’s record of £120,000 (plus buyer’s premium).

By the mid 19th century it had been completely discredited as a science, but between the 1820s and 1840s phrenology was at the peak of its popularity. And Edinburgh, where the first phrenological society was founded in 1820, was one of its centres.

FOOTBALL may be known as The Beautiful Game, but as anyone who supports a Scottish non-league team will tell you, it can sometimes seem more like viewing a scrum than watching a spectacle of sublime flair and silky skill.

JUST weeks after Clarion abandoned plans for reviving a Glasgow fair a group of Scottish dealers have announced a new Scottish event, The Merchants’ Hall Fine Art & Antiques Fair to be held in Edinburgh from September 22-24.

Giving Scotland’s once-neglected art glass further standing in the saleroom, a good range of Monart and Ysasrt glass emerged at auction recently North of the Boarder.

CLARION Scotland have cancelled the Fine Art and Antiques Show Scotland scheduled for the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, Glasgow from August 17 to 20. The new fair was essentially a relaunch of Fran Foster’s Antiques For Everyone Glasgow, which ran at the SECC for six years until its final staging in May 2005.

It gives some idea as to how furniture connoisseurship has changed that the upholstered high-back chair pictured here could once have been accepted as an original furnishing from the bedroom of Mary Queen of Scots.

There was high drama at Lyon and Turnbull’s Edinburgh saleroom on March 26 when this celadon moonflask, left, estimated at £2000-3000, shot to a house record £275,000 (plus 19.5/12% buyer’s premium).

CLARION Events Scotland are launching a new antiques fair at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow this summer. The announcement comes less than a year after Antiques For Everyone Glasgow fairs, also owned by Clarion and at the same venue, were discontinued.