Edinburgh

AS part of this year’s 550th anniversary of hallmarking in Scotland, the National Museum of Scotland are hosting The Scottish Seminar from April 11-13.

IT’S the sort of find that every dealer dreams of – a unique and valuable antique lying unrecognised and just waiting to be snapped up.

The significance of this unassuming oval cabochon emerald ring, is far greater than first appears.

Bonhams have announced the location of two major new salerooms – in Edinburgh and New York.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

Two lavish catalogues, a DVD, three days at Syon House, trips to the USA and Hong Kong, acres of press coverage… Sotheby’s and Christie’s apart, seldom can a UK auction house have devoted more time, more energy and more money to promoting a sale than Lyon & Turnbull did with the Drambuie Collection.

On a cold January 26 night in Edinburgh, a packed saleroom at Lyon & Turnbull witnessed a defining moment in the Scottish art market.

LIKE so much material where the name is so much part of the game, the exquisite objets d’art fashioned in the Russian workshops of Carl Fabergé have attracted copyists, repro-producers and outright forgers.

AFTER the mixed response to the Christopher Dresser material offered at Lyon & Turnbull (Buyers Premium 17.5%), it was left to the catalogue of decorative arts, consigned by various vendors, to provide the auctioneers with their biggest number of the day.