South-east England

A clutch of Oriental entries were among the more interesting works in the Amersham Auction Rooms’ otherwise run-of-the-mill offering of 324 antiques and collectables on 2 August.

Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschilds’ country estate in Buckinghamshire, has come over all fashionable. The theme for their 2001 season is Art in Fashion. In the garden, the parterre has been given over to the talents of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who has designed two vibrantly coloured rainbow displays of carpet bedding.

Pictured are two modern firsts, both in rather chipped jackets, from the book section of a September 7 sale held by Mallams of Oxford. P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred in Springtime of 1939 was sold for £100, while Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop of the previous year reached £210.

THE 2186 lots offered at Gorringes, (buyer’s premium 10 per cent) at Lewes on July 17, 18 and 19 had the touches of quality and variety that buyers demand but specialist Nick Muston noted the resistance to lower-value items.

MEMORIES of the Raj were the selling point at the collectors’ sale held at Amersham Auction Rooms (15% buyer’s premium) on July 5 which included pieces acquired by Lord William Hailey during his Governorship of the Punjab during the 1920s.

THE Law Fine Art sale at Southington House, a country house near Overton, Hampshire, had everything you might expect to find in a home lived in by one family for over a century.

UK: SOTHEBY’S have announced their intention to reorganise their Summers Place, Billingshurst, West Sussex operation to “take advantage of the new Olympia saleroom”. The restructure involves ending all general sales at the end of November and specialising in garden statuary, in which the rooms have established a leading reputation, and modern and vintage sporting guns and rifles.

A RECORD turnout on July 13 gave the Hampshire auctioneers Jacobs & Hunt reason to hope that the market is finally beginning to perk up although it was more specialist items, rather than general furniture, which were of most interest.

AS dealers and collectors of antique arms and armour converged on London to do battle in the salerooms of Christie’s and Bonhams a skirmish was taking place 50 miles away in the Oxford salerooms of Phillips (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) on July 18, where a field of 245 lots included these two members of the East Kent Regiment.

FURNITURE brought the biggest money at the Northern and Southern branches of (at this point) Phillips’ provincial empire with Leeds taking the honours netting £146,000 from 250 lots against a Sevenoaks total of £100,545 from 886 lots.

ARMS and toys are specialities of Lewes auctioneers Wallis & Wallis (15% buyer’s premium) and on June 11 their 285 lots of toys included die-cast tinplate toys, toy soldiers and the Mirylees Collection of Dolls’ Houses and dolls.

ESSEX organiser Robert Bailey holds his main South of England summer fair at, appropriately, Sotheby’s South, one mile north of Billingshurst in West Sussex, from August 17 to 19.

UK: The rarity of an object such as this 18th century mahogany candlestand usually points to a high estimate, but the £1000-1500 range put on this example by Henry Adams of Chichester at their sale on July 25 had the desired effect of encouraging healthy competition among bidders.

UK: SIR Alfred James Munnings proved as great a magnet as ever at Sotheby’s South’s Billingshurst rooms on July 18 when a watercolour sketch for one of his oil paintings fetched a hammer price of £62,000, more than double the low estimate.

THEY came, they saw, they appeared interested – but on sale day at Holloways, Banbury, the buyers, particularly the trade, were in the cautious sort of mood auctioneers across Britain have been experiencing in the quiet post-Olympia days.

UK: A COLLECTION of carte-de-visite photographs and signatures of leading figures of the Confederacy – the South’s leader, Jefferson Davis, and military leaders, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, among them – assembled by a Captain Busby of the Calypso, an English blockade runner, was one of more competitively contested lots in this Sussex sale. The collection was finally knocked down at £3000 to Julian Browning.

UK: IT HAS just been announced exclusively to the Antiques Trade Gazette that the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum, which holds one of the most comprehensive collections of coins and medals in the world, has received a very substantial grant to update and rewrite the history of Greek coins from their invention (c.630BC) to Alexander the Great (d.323BC).

UK: COLLECTORS’ sales are more insulated against market polarisation than most other areas with the niche appeal of the generally more affordable entries attracting greater numbers of private buyers. This sale, with most lots selling under £500, was no exception, with an 88 per cent take-up resulting in a £51,000 total.

UK: AN 80-lot collection of Japanese netsuke, inro and okimono from the deceased estate of a Lewes-based collector lifted the proceedings in Raymond P. Inman’s Sussex sale.

Furniture in country house is eclipsed by piece found in a drawer UK: PAPERWEIGHTS have not hit any sort of headlines in years and anyone outside the coterie of (mostly American) collectors may have assumed they had been relegated to the status of murder weapons in Thirties whodunits – but not so. One became the totally unexpected star of the contents of The Thorne, a country house at Bethsersden which were removed to the salerooms at Canterbury.