Oxford

Exceptional quality pictures with truly international appeal from long-standing private collections have become an all-too-rare sight in the provinces, but on October 3, thanks to significant consignments from no fewer than three deceased estates, Mallams Oxford (15% buyer’s premium) were able to offer at least half a dozen lots that wouldn’t have looked out of place at any of the world’s most expensive art fairs.

OXFORD’S Ashmolean Museum has made an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for £23m for a major redevelopment of the building. The new proposals for Europe’s oldest museum include a dedicated education centre, 100 per cent more display space and state-of-the-art environmental control.

THE Graham Rickett Collection of rowing ephemera offers a unique opportunity for collectors when it comes up for sale as part of Bonhams’ annual sale of traditional rivercraft and marine ephemera on Saturday, July 19 at the Boat Tents, near Leander Club, Henley-on-Thames.

IT’S not all Mod Brit, the modern art market in Britain – there are still buyers who want their heroes and their gardens and during May, Oxford auctioneers Mallams (15% buyer’s premium) were able to supply both markets, albeit at different price levels.

FOR the fourth year the Oxfordshire specialist in sporting antiques Manfred Schotten and the London picture dealer Nick Potter have got together for a selling exhibition of golfing art and memorabilia, but for the first time this year the show, which runs until April 17, will be held at Mr Schotten’s shop in Burford.

A £5600 National Art Collections Fund grant has enabled the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments at Oxford University to keep a handsome Baroque trumpet with a legend attached.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the market has undergone a slow but steady shift towards 20th century painting in particular the Post-War abstraction of the St Ives school whose geometric shapes and pure blocks of colour are wholly in tune with contemporary tastes.

Only the idealists of the Arts and Crafts movement could transform a humble display of wares into a decorative work of art, and the small manufacturing firm of Jesson Birkett and Co. had done just that with this sample board, right, offered at Bonhams’ Oxford sale on 17 September.

THERE was no notable furniture in Mallams 495-lot sale on August 28 (buyer's premium: 15 per cent), but a healthy selling rate for silver and jewellery and some good prices for an assortment of oddities and decorative entries, boosted overall figures.

WITH the Proms season now upon us it seems fitting that a portrait of the founder of the famous concerts, Sir Henry Wood, topped the pictures on offer at Bonhams Oxford (17.5% buyer’s premium) on June 25.

THERE were few signs of recession at an old-fashioned, all-inclusive sale at Mallams Oxford on June 27 (15% buyer's premium) where more than 80 per cent of the 540 lots got away.

THE WILD IRISH GIRL was the novel that made the name of Miss Sydney Owenson, the daughter of a Shrewsbury merchant and mayor who later married Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, surgeon to her Dublin patrons, the Marquess and Lady Abercorn. A self-proclaimed national tale, it weaves Irish history, politics and mythology into a romantic tale but the author’s vision of a politically and religiously united Ireland remains a dream.

THE Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has just acquired an important oil sketch by Sir Peter Paul Rubens thanks to grants from the National Arts Collection Fund and the Resource V&A Purchase Fund.

THE auctioneers’ decision to place the first half of a sizeable consignment of furniture from a North Oxfordshire house in Mallams January sale paid dividends when the 87 lots provided half of the £130,000 total of the 277-lot sale.

This sale comprised some 308 lots of which 300 had all come from the home of the late Brian Donald Hewens Miller.

“THIS was a very good way to get the season rolling,” said auctioneer Ben Lloyd of this 371-lot sale at Mallams Oxford on 7 September from which only one lot remained unsold.

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.

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.

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: 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).