South-west England

Alex Robins of Antique Fairs Cornwall (AFC Fairs) has run her biannual two-day antiques, vintage and decorative fairs at the Royal Cornwall Showground for nine years.

‘L’Abbé Quille’ (shown below), against whose leg a dog is seen relieving itself in the illustration, is one of 84 hand-coloured plates – 12 each of seven subjects – that make up a French magic trick book of c.1799 sold for £2900 by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) in a June 19-20 sale.

MADAM – Our estimate (£2000-4000) for Drummond’s Death of Nelson did indeed prove to be conservative but not quite as dismissive as the ‘£100-150’ quoted in the ATG might suggest (Bid Barometer, ATG No 2302).

After a 23-year career at Christie’s, where he was a director and international specialist in Asian art, Jeremy Morgan has joined Woolley & Wallis.

Thieves in Chipping Campden have struck at the core of the Court Barn Museum’s collection of Arts & Crafts silver and jewellery.

Handsomely bound, a set of Gould’s Birds of Britain offered as part of the small but select Dorros ornithological library at Christie’s New York sale of June 15 failed against a $60,000-80,000 estimate, but in a Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) sale of the previous day a very differently presented set brought a mid-estimate £36,000.

When this cabinet on stand appeared in the inventory of a Gloucestershire home in the 1920s it was described simply as ‘An old Italian Cabinet of ebony and Tortoiseshell’. In fact, it is Flemish rather than Italian and was probably made in Antwerp in the first half of the 17th century.

Purchased at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the ‘Industrial Exhibition of All Nations’ jigsaw type game shown here sold for £1350 at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) on June 16.

Coming up next for Cooper Events is the second of three annual Cotswolds Decorative Fairs, which take place in the grand hall of Westonbirt School in Burnham-on-Sea.

The interest in studio pottery goes beyond the premier names in the field. Three pieces by Waistel Cooper (1921-2003), a Scot who worked first in Porlock in Somerset and later from the Barbican Pottery in Penzance, generated plenty of bidding at Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (19% buyer’s premium) July 6 sale in Taunton.

Leading the sale of Arts & Crafts at the Woolley & Wallis June 21 sale was the monumental Pilkington’s Lancastrian vase shown above, standing some 48cm (19in) high.

The Charles Dickens Birthday Book, edited by his eldest daughter, Mary, and illustrated by his youngest, Kate, was published in 1882, 12 years after the writer’s death.