Salisbury

TIME waits for no man, the saying goes, and clients of Abraham-Louis Bréguet were certainly reminded of this fact when paying their monthly instalments to the Swiss-born watchmaker for Souscription pocket watches like this example right which featured at Woolley & Wallis’s sale on January 29.

Despite the recent media interest in the routine sale of Royal gifts through household staff and approved dealers, the practice of flogging Crown chattels is nothing new. More official and intimate material of royal provenance has buoyed the market for decades, if not centuries.

Historians have spent many enjoyable hours attempting to decipher the symbolism of pictures on the back of Georgian teaspoons such as those illustrated right. Like the club tie or the secret society handshake, the picture back teaspoon was an English gentleman’s discreet method of signalling loyalties to potential sympathisers when serving afternoon tea.

With tarriffs and subsidies yet again a hot political topic, it was appropriate that this wine label caused such a stir at Woolley and Wallis’ Salisbury salerooms on July 17.

“It was like the 1970s all over again,” said John Benjamin of Woolley and Wallis, describing the breadth of quality at his jewellery sale in Salisbury on April 24-25.

A CONMAN with an “appalling record”, who cheated antique dealers across the country has been jailed for six years at Salisbury Crown Court.

THE move towards holding specialist sales among provincial auctioneers has been one of the success stories recent years and one that is paying dividends for Salisbury’s Woolley & Wallis in one of the most arcane worlds – that of carpets and textiles.

Perfect conditions were required for the production of 18th century soft paste porcelain, but work only began on this rare group, right, after three ships laden with 44 factory staff and 88 tons of equipment had been ferried from Italy to Spain.

The Wiltshire rooms Woolley & Wallis usually hold four specialist carpet sales a year but a fifth was squeezed in before the scheduled Valentine’s Day event, and with a 77 per cent rate and £77,000 total on the 284 lots on offer, the decision by specialists June Barrett and Ian Bennett was more than justified.

Just the thing to lift the spirits in the cold, dark, stock-deprived days of winter, this spectacular whorl of a tropical centre table received a warm reception at the Salisbury salerooms of Woolley and Wallis on January 8.

This unrecorded, William Billingsley painted campana vase appeared at Woolley and Wallis’s sale in Salisbury on November 28, and not without great controversy.

UK: A striking amalgam of European form and Oriental decoration, this Meissen derived Kakiemon tankard was a rare hybrid, apparently one of only four in public record, and it consequently attracted worldwide interest at Woolley and Wallis’s sale in Salisbury on May 23.

UK: The most comprehensive and perhaps the finest collection of early silver spoons to appear on the market since the 1960s went under the hammer at Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury last Wednesday (October 25).

UK: JOHN Russell of Falkirk was a barometer maker to the Prince Regent and, as a result, this mahogany wheel-shaped example with the Prince of Wales feathers commanded considerable interest from leading London dealers at Woolley and Wallis’s Salisbury salerooms on July 4.

UK: Giant bookcases from stately homes rarely appear at provincial auctions these days, so there was justifiable interest in this early 19th century breakfront example from dealers with showrooms large enough to accommodate its 18ft 51/2in by 9ft 51/2in (5.63 x 2.88m) proportions.

UK: Charles Napier Hemy’s seascape Life 4ft 6in x 6ft (1.24m x 1.83m), signed and dated 1913, with reverse inscription, set a record for Salisbury auctioneers Woolley & Wallis on October 12 when it sold for a double mid-estimate £110,000 plus premium.

UK: A PRIME piece of Gothic revival furniture, this early Victorian oak metamorphic library armchair, possibly to a design by John Loudon, made £5600 (plus 10 per cent buyer’s premium) from the Irish trade at the Salisbury salerooms of Woolley and Wallis on August 24.

UK: THE ENORMOUS wheel screw on this simulated oven gives some clue as to the gruesome purpose of the plated contraption which turned up at the Salisbury salerooms of Woolley and Wallis on June 23.