South-west England

Pin cushions have their own niche market in the novelty silver field. Nineteen Edwardian examples were offered at a sale at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) in Salisbury last year.

Edwardian silver table bells modelled as tortoises are not too hard to find but silver pigs are a much rarer beast. Accordingly, it was surprising to see two appear on two successive days at winter sales.

A bid of £5000 from a Contemporary art gallery in London secured this post-war portrait by the writer and Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957).

Varied selection of Down Under images joins British art on offer in Salisbury saleroom.

Several 19th and 20th century sporting paintings from named estates provided a healthy boost at two regional salerooms.

Items from the estate of the Dame Elisabeth Frink (1930-93) were included in the Charterhouse (25% buyer’s premium) sale in Sherborne, Dorset, on November 14-15.

Michael Faraday’s laboratory notebook from 1851 includes a series of diagrams illustrating what he called ‘magnetic lines of force’ – the magnetic field lines that are central to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

The Chinese carved wooden statue pictured below is one of the offerings at the January Cotswolds Decorative Antiques & Art Fair, where the selection of Asian art is set to be wide and varied.

Jeremy Lamond, former director of Halls, will be joining auction house Woolley & Wallis at the end of March 2020 as head of the valuations department and associate director.

A collection of vintage travel posters included a number with the added advantage of local appeal when offered by Penzance auction house David Lay (18% buyer’s premium).

In a large collection of fountain pens offered at Cornish auction house Barbara Kirk (15% buyer’s premium) most well-known makers were represented, but among the rarer ones were no fewer than 19 by the Italian manufacturer Omas.

Focus on two shops launched in a former bank in Wiltshire and restaurant in Cumbria

When this portrait of a young woman was first exhibited in the early 1930s, critics remarked on its “intensity and vital quality”, “the charming head” and the “wonderful life-like expression”.

Nick Bayliss of Continuity Fairs is launching a new biannual antiques, home and vintage fair at Bath Racecourse, the UK’s highest flat racecourse.

Albert Moulton Foweraker’s (1873-1942) main interest as a watercolourist was the effect of blue moonlight on the landscape.

Included among more than 70 paintings and prints offered at Dorset saleroom Clarke’s Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) was this uncharacteristic Joseph Farquharson (1846-1935) oil of the artist’s garden in Aberdeenshire.

Less often seen than Suffragette propaganda and considerably less PC these days, a brass and enamel fob badge for the National League for Opposing Woman had its international admirers at Ipswich auction house Lockdales (19.5% buyer’s premium).

IACF has announced a change to the three-day antiques and collectors’ fairs held in Shepton Mallet at the Royal Bath and West Showground five times a year.

Invented in the 19th century but outmoded by word processors then computers, typewriters are now having a resurgence in the collecting world.