West Sussex

Adding a classical touch to a highly successful five-day sale at West Sussex auction house Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) was a 1st century AD Greco-Roman marble lower torso of Aphrodite.

Collectors who missed out on a rare late 19th century cabin trunk at auction last week have the chance to buy another in West Sussex this coming Friday.

Extinct for 65 million years, dinosaurs continue to rule the world of children visiting the National History Museum, of multi-million dollar movie makers – and of bidders at the Evolution Sales at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

Rountree Tryon Galleries celebrates its 60th anniversary next month, leasing out a large barn in Sussex to launch its annual Africa show.

The year after Cedric Morris painted his verdant Foxgloves in 1932, a severe drought cut through much of southern Britain. The parched soil and the hardship it brought were a source of artistic inspiration for those who painted the form and the character of the rural landscape.

Always popular items, a Georgian lead cistern offered at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) was also rare in being circular. Usually they are rectangular, having stood against a wall connected to downpipes.

Turbulent as politics are today, they have yet to reach the rumbustious heights of a notorious 1826 by-election in Northumberland, memories of which were revisited at Newcastle auction house Anderson & Garland (20% buyer’s premium).

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Offered with an a/f catalogue caveat, this early 20th century marine chronometer, below, quadrupled expectations at Chichester saleroom Henry Adams (20% buyer’s premium).

Variety was certainly in evidence in a West Sussex sale, where the teenage journal of a young stained-glass maker, two broadside ballads and an illustrated dummy for 'Down with Skool!' all brought much higher than predicted bids.

Bellmans in Wisborough Green, West Sussex is to offer two watercolours by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) as part of a Fine Paintings sale on October 15. Both come from a local private collection.

An Abstract work by the 20th century Filipino artist Oscar Zalameda (1930-2010) emerged as the star lot in an interiors auction in West Sussex.

The words ‘country’ and ‘brocante’ have an allure of their own as Lucy Haywood discovered when she founded the Country Brocante store in the village of Midhurst, West Sussex.

A lot comprising 31 posters plugging top groups and festivals from 1969-72 was the major hit at Bellmans’ (22% buyer’s premium) Photographs, Posters and Prints sale.

Italian sculptors were the hottest property as garden statuary flourished at summer sales in the Home Counties.

In market terms, ecclesiastical gates are not the subject of mass appeal but examples by major 19th century designers certainly had their devotees at two June sales.

In the 1950s French designer Raymond Cohen and his firm Cohray were producing a range of ultra-modern furniture that – although made for the machine age – were all put together by hand.