South-west England

The jewellery sale at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury on October 30 includes over 60 engraved gems – both ancient and Neoclassical – from several single-owner collections. A selection of rings is pictured here:

The 19-acre former South Crofty tin and copper mine in the village of Pool, near Redruth in west Cornwall, closed as recently as 1996 and is now part of a local mining landscape World Heritage Site.

Antiques Fairs Cornwall, which runs a biannual two-day fair at the Royal Cornwall Showground, holds its regular monthly antiques and collectors’ fair at Pensilva near Liskeard. This is the largest one-day fair in Cornwall with up to 74 stands.

Emporium Antiques in Liskeard currently has on its site an item of local interest. This is a memorial shield, below, to the Honourable Thomas Agar-Robartes (1880-1915) who was elected as a Liberal MP for his home town of Bodmin in the 1906 general election.

Our weekly selection from salerooms.

Signed by its author to the title-page, a 1939 first of TS Eliot’s 'Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats' sold for £4300 in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) auction.

Bearing a modest estimate of £50-75 but sold instead at £800 by Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (23% buyer’s premium) on September 4 was a copy of 'Women’s Suffrage: a Short History of a Great Movement' (1912) by that renowned campaigner for women’s political rights, Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

Spotlight on the county’s many opportunities for antiques hunting.

Daniel Mendoza is considered one of the first ‘modern’ boxers – one who helped elevate boxing to a sport rather than just two blokes beating each other up.

Inspired by LS Lowry, the self-taught Mancunian artist Fred Yates (1922-2008) set out to paint pictures about the lives of ordinary people. These canvases – ranging from the industrial architecture and street life of Manchester to the sunnier scenes he painted after his move to Cornwall in 1969 – attract a loyal following on the secondary market.

Christopher Jones specialises in 18th, 19th and 20th century decorative antiques, furniture, lighting and porcelain. He next stands at the Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair in Battersea from October 1-6.

A gold, jade and rock crystal model of a sedan chair by Fabergé was hammered down at £380,000 last week – a new house record for a Gloucestershire auctioneer.

The second published work of the ‘flower book lady’ has no other auction appearance

One of the star turns in the summer sale in South Cerney of Martin Orsky’s wonderful library emerged towards the end of the day. This was a uniformly framed set of five stencil coloured woodcut broadsides, heightened with bodycolour and glitter and representing ‘The Five Senses’, sold at £30,000.

Reinagle’s equine portrait painted in Reading brewery brings £15,000 at Salisbury sale

It was while working as a studio assistant to Lord Leighton in the early 1860s that John Emms (1841-1912) travelled to Lyndhurst in the New Forest, a trip that would define his career as a painter of dog portraits and sporting scenes.

A pocket globe with some areas still a mystery leads a maritime auction at Exeter saleroom Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood.