South-west England

This inter-war ‘English school’ portrait of a seated gentleman wearing a bow tie, bought for around £150 three decades ago, sold for an unexpected £7600 at Charterhouse (21% buyer’s premium) on January 17. The unfinished 4ft 2in x 3ft 4in (1.27 x 1.01m) oil was dated 1922 but unsigned.

Offered to a packed and enthusiastic saleroom, the 750-lot silver sale at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) of Crewkerne was divided into three parts: an extraordinary reference library, a broad sweep of the market for British and Continental white metal and a niche single-owner collection. It brought two-and-three-quarter cheers.

Textiles represent a wide and varied collecting field, a huge range of which is displayed in the show 'Material: Textile' at Messums Wiltshire, from practical pieces to intricately conceived works of art.

This late 19th century cameo glass vase by the highly collectable Stourbridge maker Stevens & Williams was the outstanding offering among the 195 lots at Michael J Bowman’s (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale at Chudleigh on January 19.

A set of four Cotswold School Arts & Crafts wall sconces, one shown below, was catalogued by Moore Allen & Innocent (20% buyer’s premium) as in the Wild Strawberry pattern and in the manner of Ernest Gimson (1864-1919).

“There’s no money around in January” is the refrain you often hear from businesses in the new year. But, as we know, the auction world behaves differently from other commercial markets.

This Aesthetic movement X-frame armchair took £11,000 against an estimate of just £100-150 at Lawrences of Crewkerne.

The antiques-rich town of Honiton in Devon is famed for its bobbin lacemaking since the 16th century.

The Thomas Del Mar (24% buyer’s premium) sale in London on December 5 included several excellent pairs of English pistols.

The traditionally ‘dead’ period between Christmas and New Year was enlivened by the December 28 sale at Wotton Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) in Gloucestershire – to the extent that more than 20,000 people suffering withdrawal symptoms worldwide viewed it online and 1360 of them registered to bid.

Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (19.5% buyer’s premium) first sale of the year got off to a bright start with a Singaporean painting sailing to £19,000.

Historically the first major sale of the year, the January ‘furniture’ auction at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) turns eyes towards Salisbury for evidence of what the next 12 months will bring.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

The British Art Pottery sales at Woolley & Wallis have posted some remarkable sums for single William De Morgan tiles.

Ephemera, photos and, remarkably, a penguin egg relating to Captain Robert Scott’s ill-fated 'Terra Nova' Expedition to the Antarctic in 1910 were eagerly contested in the room, on the phone and online at Stroud Auction Rooms’ latest sale.

Edinburgh offers an antiques trail as does Carmarthenshire in Wales. Now it’s the turn of Ashburton, a small town in south Devon on the edge of Dartmoor with a population of 4000.

The drive by, among others, the Royal Academy and the National Gallery to promote women’s importance in art would have required little effort had campaigners looked at the world of modern ceramics.