South-west England

The ceramics sale at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury on April 30 includes two maiolica apothecary jars and covers from the celebrated Fortuna series – an ambitious suite of pharmacy jars and jugs made in the third quarter of the 16th century.

A month before the emergence of three Compass factory figures in Lewes, the eighth and ninth recorded pieces by America’s earliest-known porcelain maker were offered for sale in Salisbury.

Rare examples of early English porcelain are still capable of remarkable sums.

The Court Gallery has joined forces with the Museum of Somerset to stage an exhibition of the works of Doris Hatt (1890-1969), a local pioneer of British modernism.

Patrick Macintosh deals in English country house antiques from the 17th-20th centuries with an emphasis on quirky furniture. He is based in Sherborne, Dorset, and exhibits at the Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair in Battersea with fellow dealer Richard Nadin.

Exhibitors at Bath Decorative Antiques Fair toasted 30 years as the event opened last week.

Familiar striking shapes and bright colours retain a strong following despite a fall in demand from the 1980s-90s heyday.

A selection of five pieces of Clarice Cliff offered at different price levels at Woolley & Wallis on March 20 .

The plethora of single-collection sales at the start of the year was not at the expense of old-fashioned auctions offering good-quality offerings across the range of dealing and collecting – such as the Winter Fine Arts sale at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) of Dorchester.

What seems to have been an overdue clear-out at Monmouth Trading Standards department led to half a dozen lots of imperial weights and measures being consigned to Stroud Auctions (18% buyer’s premium).

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening… is the single volume that I have selected from a recent Gloucestershire auction in which job lots were very much in evidence and that acted as a sort of extra, clearing-the-decks sort of exercise in the saleroom’s calendar.

The sale at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (plus 21% buyer’s premium) on January 29 – an event dominated by the multi-estimate performance of a Qianlong mark vase in the Ming taste sold at £460,000 (see ATG No 2378) – also included a hardwood (probably olivewood), bone and mother-of-pearl inlaid model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Illustrated with eight hand-coloured litho plates, each with moveable flaps, The Puppy’s Visit To His Friends was issued as one of EC Bennett’s moveable books, probably in the 1850s.

Late 18th-century works for children combine juvenile diversion with moral instruction.

Letters on the sails of the vessels seen on the title-page of Pedro de Syria’s Arte de la Verdadera Navegacion, published in Valencia in 1602, are a reminder that it was Columbus’ voyage in Spanish service just over a hundred years earlier that led to the ‘discovery’ of the Americas.