South-east England

FOR the first time conservation specialists will participate in the Dorking Street Festival.

AT 10.41 on the morning of August 25, 1875, to the sounds of Rule Britannia, Captain Matthew Webb emerged from the cold and choppy waters of the Channel. It had taken him 21 hours and 41 minutes. He had covered close to 40 miles. But he had become the first man to swim from English to French soil.

DEALER and, more recently, fair organiser, Jan Hicks moves to the grounds of Loseley Park, a 16th century house near Guildford, Surrey, for her third Antiques & Audacity fair from May 12 to 15 next year.

IT looks very much like the end of the road for one of our long-running provincial fixtures, the Surrey Antiques Fair, the 36th annual staging of which was held from October 2 to 5 last year.

SOME of the 16 shows which comprise the traditional autumn season of selling exhibitions held by the Cotswold Antiques Dealers’ Association have already been covered in this column but here are a few more to whet the appetite.

FOLLOWING the Antiques Trade Gazette’s coverage of the sale of a micromosaic table signed by Michelangelo Barberi for £250,000 at Dreweatt Neate’s Donnington Priory rooms in January – still the highest price achieved for an item of furniture in a UK saleroom so far this year – the Newbury firm received a call from a gentleman in Scotland.

VETERAN organiser Fred Hynds of Wakefield Ceramics Fairs holds a ceramics event at Burford School, Burford, Oxfordshire this weekend on October 2 and 3.

SUSPICION that the market for Irish pictures, at least on this side of the Irish Sea, might be in a softer state than it was three or four years ago, were dramatically dispelled at the Guildford rooms of Clarke Gammon Weller (15% buyer’s premium) on September 7 when a rather late, but completely fresh-to-market, canvas by Paul Henry (1876-1958) was offered.

RIGHT: he had initially catalogued it as by Archibald Knox, but it was not until Buckinghamshire auctioneer John Dickins removed its cover shortly before the sale that he realised what a rarity he was really offering in this 19in (48cm) high Arts and Crafts mantel clock.

SUSSEX-based Caroline Penman, that doyenne of fair organisers, moved into Uckfield last year and it has not taken her long to stamp her identity on the small market town.

FIRST edition copies of John Martyn’s translations of Virgil’s Georgicks (1741) and Bucolicks (1749), both illustrated with coloured plates and maps and bound in contemporary calf, made £500 in a September 17 sale held by John Bellman of Billingshurst.

AT a time when many dealers are scaling down and reducing costs, Burford sporting antiques specialist, Manfred Schotten, is opening his new trade warehouse to coincide with his Old Sport. Here's Sport Indeed exhibition as part of the CADA autumn selling exhibition which runs from October 9-23.

BILLED as the top gun on the catalogue cover of the September 1 sales at Lewes arms and armour specialists Wallis & Wallis (15% buyer's premium), this c.1649 German or Dutch 34-bore wheel lock pistol lived up to its reputation.

NOW under new ownership, Petersfield auctioneers Jacobs & Hunt have announced a new monthly general sale.

THE solid cast metal figures produced by Georg Heyde in Dresden from 1872 until the Second World War can lack the detail and proportion of the best lead miniatures, but they are celebrated for the imaginative and animated uses to which Heyde put them.

RIGHT: offered as the final lot of the day, this 21oz Guild of Handicrafts silver and enamel comport proved to be one of the stars of Clarke Gammon Wellers’ sale on September 7.

LABELLED the Worthing Sale, the event held by Gorringes (15% buyer’s premium) in association with Michael Jones & Co in the West Sussex town on August 26 had a number of items from the estate of the late collector/dealer Gary Maple.

NOW well established, the twice-yearly Petersfield Antiques Fair, organised by Caroline Penman at the Hampshire town’s Festival Hall, is a traditional fair which usually ticks over to the general satisfaction of its 43 or so exhibitors.

NOW well established, the twice-yearly Petersfield Antiques Fair, organised by Caroline Penman at the Hampshire town’s Festival Hall, is a traditional fair which usually ticks over to the general satisfaction of its 43 or so exhibitors.

Furniture from Hills House, Denham, the property of Sir John and Lady Mills, will be sold at auction by Hamptons of Godalming on October 20.