Gloucestershire

A watercolour of a thoroughbred racehorse auction appeared at Chorley’s (20% buyer’s premium) of Prinknash Abbey Park, Gloucestershire, on May 21 – 123 years to the day since it had itself last sold at auction.

Two rackets rackets (no, you aren’t seeing double) are on offer at the exhibition '#7 – It’s a Magic Number', organised by Cotswolds dealers Manfred Schotten and Christopher Clarke Antiques.

Playing cards from two recent provincial sales are featured here – five examples from a 250-lot, single-owner collection offered in Gloucestershire, and a single pack from a Worcestershire sale.

Sent to auction by a descendant, two partly broken and disbound journals relating to the early years in the naval career of William Chimmo (1828-91) proved an unexpected success in a recent South Cerney sale.

A large oil on panel map by MacDonald Gill celebrating the presence of stationer WH Smith on the British high street in the 1920s was hammered down at £50,000 in Gloucestershire.

Running to 50 volumes in all, the official report on 'The Scientific Results of the Voyage of HMS Challenger during the years 1873-76 in Atlantic, Pacific and Antarctic seas' took some 23 years to complete.

Bearing later Georgian or Victorian embossed decoration, this 13¾in (35cm) diameter, 22oz silver charger, below, was a much earlier work.

Signed to the front cover by all four members of the group, a 1963 ‘Star Special’ (No 12) issue of the fan magazine Meet the Beatles sold for £4200 at Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) on March 6. It also bore the name of a former owner, one RC Zebedee of Bournemouth.

It was during a period of intense industrialisation that the 19th century pastoral tradition in British print making flourished.

The Old Master section of Dominic Winter’s sale on March 7 yielded multi-estimate sums for two works that were linked to major names in Renaissance and marine art.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening… is the single volume that I have selected from a recent Gloucestershire auction in which job lots were very much in evidence and that acted as a sort of extra, clearing-the-decks sort of exercise in the saleroom’s calendar.

Late 18th-century works for children combine juvenile diversion with moral instruction.

Letters on the sails of the vessels seen on the title-page of Pedro de Syria’s Arte de la Verdadera Navegacion, published in Valencia in 1602, are a reminder that it was Columbus’ voyage in Spanish service just over a hundred years earlier that led to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas.

Drawn from sales held in the last days of January in the UK and US, an artistic device of framing a view with trees in the foreground is demonstrated in the two plates reproduced below.