UK

This Edinburgh sale of ceramics and glass on 30 November was notably well attended from the South of England, with dealers from London, Nottingham and Gloucestershire on the floor of the saleroom.

Switzerland, Austria, The Pyrenees, the Rockies are all names one readily associates with skiing. Algeria, on the other hand, conjures up sun, sea and beaches but this poster advertising a winter sports week in 1930, 69 kilometres from Algiers, aims to show another side of North Africa.

THE Glasgow Boys school of painters will be the subject of the inaugural exhibition at the Fleming Collection at 13 Berkeley Street, London W1 at the end of this month.

Japanese works of art sales will no longer be held on a regular basis by Sotheby’s New York. Specialist Sachiko Hori will be retained by the company, while her co-director Ryoichi Iida will become a consultant.

First icollector close their London operation, now sothebys.com consolidate service in New York: Growing acceptance that the US antiques trade and collectors are happier to complete transactions online than their UK counterparts is illustrated by two major moves that have just been announced.

PALLANT House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex, has secured a £3.85m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to build a new wing.

What is reckoned by the auctioneers to be a new auction record for Russian furniture was set at Christie’s December 13 Continental furniture sale in London when this 22in (56cm) wide silver- and ormolu- mounted faceted cut steel centre table, c.1785-90, sold for £620,000 to a European dealer after a battle between seven telephones.

Jewellery is a classic Christmas seller and, combined with the current demand for Art Nouveau this hallmarked silver Charles Horner pendant, right, was always a likely seller.

Furniture of all nationalities has been much in evidence in London over the past few weeks as late November/early December is traditionally one of the two periods in the year when the London rooms offer their best English and Continental fare.

DEALERS stalling at Bermondsey Market have voiced further opposition to plans to redevelop the site as part of a £19m urban regeneration project.

THE Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is to be the new home for Federico Barocci’s £1.3m drawing Study for The Institution of the Eucharist.

The inaugural specialist sale of some 350 character jugs at the Stoke on Trent ceramics auctioneers Potteries Specialist Auction (12.5% buyer’s premium) on November 17 was, said the auctioneers, a great success with specialist UK dealers and collectors flocking to the Cobridge rooms.

Retrouvius of Kensal Green, London, is an architectural reclamation and design partnership founded in 1993 by Adam Hills and Maria Speake, both of whom had previously studied architecture at Glasgow School of Art.

Dealers often complain about the way that private bidders get over-excited at auctions and pay ridiculously inflated prices they wouldn’t dream of giving in a gallery. But for once it looks - or rather looked – as if a major player in the trade had suffered a serious attack of auction fever following Jermyn Street agent Guy Morrison’s terse admission that he was now the happy owner of £9.4m Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) portrait.

This unrecorded, William Billingsley painted campana vase appeared at Woolley and Wallis’s sale in Salisbury on November 28, and not without great controversy.

George Jones majolica continues to be extraordinarily popular with buyers, both trade and private. Some damage to a George Jones cheese dish and cover offered in Birmingham at Biddle & Webb saw it estimated at £300-500 so it came as rather a surprise when it soared above this.

The book section of a general antiques sale held by Cheffins of Cambridge on November 1 ran to only 58 lots, but this saleroom produces impressive, colour illustrated catalogues and no fewer that a dozen of those lots were illustrated, some of them at full page.

THE best seller at Tennants’ sale on November 22-23 in the Yorkshire Dales was consigned by a Yorkshire family with connections to the famous silversmith who made it.

A small part of the English trade’s history went under the hammer along with the last effects of Leicester dealer Ernest Galinksy at Warner Auctions sale on 31 October.

Light sculpture is what noted potter Margaret O’Rorke calls her distinctive and novel work, which is on exhibition until December 21 at Galerie Besson, 15 Royal Arcade off Old Bond Street, London W1.