East Sussex

The 80th anniversary of Operation Dynamo, aka the Dunkirk evacuation in May-June 1940, has been in the headlines recently. However, less well known is the fate of the British 51st Highland Division almost 100 miles further along the French coast.

The Chad Valley tinplate toy 'The Climbing Miller' is based closely on an earlier ‘gravity’ toy called 'Gustav the Busy Miller' that was one of Lehmann’s most popular issues made for close to 50 years in the pre-war era.

Svend Hammershøi (1873-1948), younger brother of painter Vilhelm, is best known as a ceramicist but he was also a silversmith.

The name of the Finnish writer and illustrator Tove Jansson (1914-2001) may not be as familiar in the UK as that of many other creators of children’s favourites.

Across the past 13 months Gorringe’s (21% buyer’s premium) in Lewes has dispersed the remarkable assemblage of English porcelain formed by the collector and academic Dr Dennis G Rice.

Appearing in 1937, a couple of years after the locomotive itself was launched, the LMS Princess Elizabeth was the biggest and best locomotive that Hornby ever made.

Since its launch in 1953 there have been well over a dozen distinct references of the Rolex Submariner, with all sorts of minutiae adding up to several hundred different variants.

A cross-section of Asian art – Qing porcelain, Meiji Satsuma and Euro-Asiatic ivories – provided the prizes at Gorringe’s (21% buyer’s premium) spring sale held in Lewes.

A rare creamware transfer printed and painted beaker offered for sale by Mellors & Kirk (20% buyer’s premium) in Nottingham told a dark tale.

Impressionistic pastoral landscapes, often featuring cattle, are the signature works of John Alfred Arnesby Brown (1866-1955).

Popular in the first decades of the 19th century, the eight-key flute is something of a transitional instrument, retaining many of the characteristics of the earlier baroque flute and the modern instrument.

“I will always be a painter of beaches,” declared Eugène Boudin (1824-98) in 1864.

After a 17-minute bidding battle, a Chinese blue and white bottle vase with a Daoguang (1820-50) six-character seal mark was hammered down for £270,000 at Gorringe’s in Lewes, East Sussex.

Out of favour for a generation, grand tour and ancient intaglios and cameos are enjoying a return to form.

Jeroen Markies of Jeroen Markies Art Deco is based in East Sussex and next stands at the Winter Art & Antiques Fair (November 5-10).

A near sell-out show at The Redfern Gallery in London in 1963 immediately established Patrick Procktor (1936-2003), the Dublin-born painter, as a star of the London art scene at the age of just 27.

Sold alongside a pile of Victorian green-glazed leaf plates and dishes, the primary appeal of this lot offered in a weekly sale at Gorringe’s (21% buyer’s premium) of Lewes was the whimsical majolica cheese dish.

Original paintings by Abstract artist Nicolas de Stael (1914-55) rarely appear at auction outside the main salerooms in London, Paris and New York.

Dealers who give up trading up from shop premises in favour of a unit or units at an antiques centre have differing stories as to why they make that choice.