West Sussex

Nearly six months after doors closed on the last major British antiques fair, another is ready to open.

An extraordinary cache of garden statuary, unseen for decades, comes for sale at Summers Place Auctions next month.

“We opened at the earliest opportunity two months ago and were immediately ridiculously busy,” said David Skeet, general manager of the Brighton and Lewes fleamarkets.

While Manchester United and early FA Cup match programmes often make the big money at auction, a group on offer at a West Sussex saleroom showed that far less famous names can also make the running.

The artist John Hurford was a key figure in the British psychedelia movement of the late 1960s.

Two works by Fred Stead (1863-1940) drew strong interest at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) in West Sussex thanks, in part, to here-to-be-sold estimates. They were being consigned from a deceased estate.

Despite – or because of – the imminent prohibition, good-quality antique ivory works of art continue to bring solid prices at auction.

This 8 x 10in (21 x 25cm) oil on canvas board sketch of two farmhands cutting grasses with a scythe is unsigned but it carries a label on the back from an Ipswich Borough Council exhibition which identifies the artist as Harry Becker (1865-1928) and the picture’s title as Fieldworkers in Mid-Summer.

Kevis House Gallery in Petworth hailed the return to business as sales followed the reopening of its premises.

A Purdey & Sons double-barrel hammer rifle built in 1875 for the Prince of Wales’ Indian tour of 1875-76 sold for £8000 at the Gavin Gardiner (25% buyer’s premium) live online auction of Modern & Vintage Sporting Guns on April 22.

Puritan Cotton Mather’s defence of executions is latest work on the subject to surface.

As a young man in the 1960s, British creative designer Anthony Redmile (b.1937) took the London interior design scene by storm. Although his work was hugely eclectic, he became best known for his quirky designs taken from the animal kingdom.

Paul Jenkins (1923-2012), an American Abstract artist and member of the New York School, was born in Kansas City. He worked at a ceramics factory in his youth, an experience that heavily influenced his tactile methods of painting.

Said to date from the 12th-14th century, an incomplete and dampstained Middle Eastern medical manuscript sold for £70,000 at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) on February 22.

Sold for £4600 in a February 6 sale held in the Chichester salerooms of Stride & Son (18% buyer’s premium) was an album of cut-paper work produced by Elizabeth Cobbold c.1810-20.

New Midhurst owner keeps the Emmott Promotions name going

Two items in focus at Midhurst

According to patent documents dated February 1928, Woodlite headlamps invented by a William G Woods of Los Angeles were said to give the driver better illumination of distant objects ahead.

This early-20th century snow scene, below, was painted by the French artist Paul Elie Gernez (1888-1948). He was primarily a naturalist painter of still-lives, landscapes and seascapes, and spent much of his life in Honfleur in Normandy.