Gloucestershire

The growing demand in recent years to own pictures by women artists has brought this long-overlooked area of the art market to the fore. In an auction at Cirencester auction house Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) two works by women painters stood out.

Sold for a record $2750 (£2220) at PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) in California on October 10 was an inscribed copy of The World Set Free, a prophetic novel by HG Wells.

A buoyant specialist subject in its own right, studio pottery appeared at a number of the recent Design sales with material by major British names selling in the expected low four-figure range.

First work in photographer’s classic coverage of China and its people makes £48,000.

A sale devoted to Military and Aviation History at Dominic Winter in South Cerney on November 7 includes a rare invitation ticket c.1913 to witness the first man to ‘loop-the-loop’ in a live demonstration at Brooklands Automobile Racing Club.

Tom Mason’s collecting bug began when his father sent him postcards and gifts from places where he was posted during the Second World War. By his early teens he had started his own collection of military memorabilia and began what would become a lifetime obsession with the American Civil War. Pen pals in the US and Canada helped him search for relics.

‘Grolieresque’ cover on 1527 edition of key Italian Renaissance work boosts auction value.

Shown below are the frontispiece and title-page of Newes from the East-Indies..., a 1638 account by William Bruton of his travels in ‘Bengalla’.

Signed by its author to the title-page, a 1939 first of TS Eliot’s 'Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats' sold for £4300 in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) auction.

Christopher Jones specialises in 18th, 19th and 20th century decorative antiques, furniture, lighting and porcelain. He next stands at the Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair in Battersea from October 1-6.

A gold, jade and rock crystal model of a sedan chair by Fabergé was hammered down at £380,000 last week – a new house record for a Gloucestershire auctioneer.

One of the star turns in the summer sale in South Cerney of Martin Orsky’s wonderful library emerged towards the end of the day. This was a uniformly framed set of five stencil coloured woodcut broadsides, heightened with bodycolour and glitter and representing ‘The Five Senses’, sold at £30,000.

Japanese carved ivories of a tiger and an elephant soared far above estimate at Chorley’s (22% buyer’s premium).

Entry card for 1823 auction sells in Gloucestershire saleroom nearly 200 years later

An exhibition of 18th and 19th century Indian mica pictures is a stand-out offering at a new arts festival in the Cotswolds.