Dorset

Falling short of ambitious hopes but leading the day at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) first sale of 2020 was a fine English Golden Age longcase clock.

Found in the roof space of a Devon cottage, an oil painting of a pointer dog in an open field sold for £3400 at Sherborne saleroom Charterhouse (25% buyer’s premium).

Several 19th and 20th century sporting paintings from named estates provided a healthy boost at two regional salerooms.

Items from the estate of the Dame Elisabeth Frink (1930-93) were included in the Charterhouse (25% buyer’s premium) sale in Sherborne, Dorset, on November 14-15.

Included among more than 70 paintings and prints offered at Dorset saleroom Clarke’s Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) was this uncharacteristic Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935) oil of the artist’s garden in Aberdeenshire.

In the resilient Beswick market, collectors paid high prices for some rarities – even modern prototypes – at autumn sales.

Duke’s latest Asian art sale had been headlined by items from a local resident and well-known auctioneer, academic and collector, Anthony du Boulay. The 249 lots from early classic wares to Cantonese enamels generated plenty of saleroom energy and a total of around £800,000.

The old-fashioned country house sale hardly ever fails to cause excitement. The on-the-premises sale of contents from Athelhampton House, a Tudor manor house in Puddletown, Dorset, was no exception.

‘Highly unusual’ is how the Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) cataloguer described a Second World War medal group ahead of its sale in Dorchester on August 22 for £420, just over top estimate.

Last week’s on-the-premises sale at Athelhampton House in Dorset was a near sell-out with a hammer price of close to £1.2m.

Catalogued as ‘witch’ mirrors, this c.1970 pair certainly charmed bidders at Dorchester auction house Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium). The key was the signature Line Vautrin, ROI for the Parisienne designer and decorative artist Line Vautrin (1913-97).

Oil paintings by two significant names in Modern British art made their first appearances on the market in decades at an auction in Dorset.

Our weekly selection from salerooms.

Daniel Mendoza is considered one of the first ‘modern’ boxers – one who helped elevate boxing to a sport rather than just two blokes beating each other up.

It was while working as a studio assistant to Lord Leighton in the early 1860s that John Emms (1841-1912) travelled to Lyndhurst in the New Forest, a trip that would define his career as a painter of dog portraits and sporting scenes.

Estimated at £100-150, this mid-20th century portrait of a fashionably dressed young woman attracted a flurry of bids at Sherborne saleroom Charterhouse (25% buyer’s premium).

Landscape painter Sidney Richard Percy (1821-86) is described in Christopher Wood’s Dictionary of Victorian Painters as “a prolific and variable painter, and his prices vary accordingly”.

A controversial Second World War poster by renowned designer Abram Games (1914-96) has sold for what is believed to be an auction record.