UK

UK: TAKE a look at this meuble d’appui right, mounted with gilt, painted with flowers and inlaid with olive, plum, rosewood, purpleheart and ebony – a sumptuous piece of late 19th century Gallic furniture, n’est-ce pas?

UK: THE general and specialist art sales held in Swindon in December are getting fairly short shrift here – 1350 lots were offered over two days – but before this report appeared, the Wiltshire firm had already held their first sales of the new year and the last of the old must necessarily be tidied away.

UK: THE current market for anything by L.S. Lowry (1887-1976) was highlighted on January 6 at Cranbrook Auction Rooms (10 per cent buyer’s premium) by this rather uncharacteristic signed crayon drawing, right, The Fat Man.

UK: EARLY 20th century ceramics were again very much in evidence at the Leicester rooms 500-lot pre-Christmas dispersal.

UK: OTHER auctioneers may look for a seasonal angle but, as Birmingham arms and armour specialists Weller & Dufty (15 per cent buyer’s premium) are aware, the arms trade is not a natural beneficiary of the Christmas spirit. True, the two murderous six-shot pepperbox pistols, right, could have been carried by a passenger on one of those Christmas card coaches, but they were among the day’s top bids on December 6 for the less sentimental values of rarity and condition.

UK: A SUBSTANTIAL offering of furniture, most of it 19th century and brown, received a mixed response from the Scottish and North of England trade at the last Phillips sale in Edinburgh before Christmas.

UK: Veteran auctioneer Jim Collingridge of Christie’s South Kensington retired last month after a 56-year career at the rostrum.

UK: DECORATIVE pieces stood out at this 1000-lot £104,000 sale of 1000 basically general lots.

UK: QUITE possibly starting its long career as a Christmas present for a child, this Steiff teddy bear was the familiar target of collectors at the Horsham rooms of Latimers (15 per cent buyer’s premium) on December 14, the second of a two-day dispersal at this new addition to the Sussex auction world.

UK: THE FIRST Tolkiens of 2001 combined to add £11,000 to the takings at this Bath sale.

The Catalogue of Silver in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester by Peter Boughton, published by Phillimore & Co, Chichester. Available from the museum on 01244 402008 fax: 01244 347587 or bookshops. ISBN 186077153X £19.95 pb.

UK: ONE CHART was very creased and there was a stain on the frontispiece that penetrated to the title page and early leaves, but the copy of Bligh’s Narrative of the Mutiny on [the...] Bounty offered in Carlisle was a tightly bound copy of the 1790 first edition in a contemporary binding of quarter calf and marbled boards, and it sold at £3150.

UK: AFFIRMING its place as the London fair which reaches the parts other fairs do not reach, the winter version of the thrice-yearly Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair, held in its trademark marquee in Battersea Park, SW11 from January 16 to 21, once again made its distinctive mark among the first fairs of the year.

UK: THIS looks the life! Relaxed in elegant company, high above the world and its cares on a sunlit terrace with parasols and palms.

UK: CLOSE to 640 lots were packed into the catalogue of the last Bloomsbury sale of the old year – half of them scientific and medical – but compared with the sale of the previous week, reported in Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1473, four-figure bids were few and far between.

UK: SUPPLY the goods and, through hell or, in this case, high water, they will come. The new Chichester operation of Henry Adams underlined this article of auctioneering faith when at their second sale they were able to put up a good range of items sought by the middle and upper markets and, despite the serious local flooding (one would-be buyer marooned miles away phoned to complain that the sale should have been cancelled), they enjoyed a considerable success.

UK: THE most prominent entry to this monthly two-day sale in Devon was an early 19th century linen press had come from a South Coast farmhouse.

UK: WITH the trade’s rumour mill in overdrive over the possible closure of Sotheby’s Billingshurst, the decision by a West Sussex businessman to open a new auction house Latimers (15 per cent buyer’s premium) in Horsham, barely 10 miles away from Summers Place, could well prove to be timely.

UK: THIS 63/4in (17cm) high striking table clock proved to be the most expensive lot in a sale of clocks and watches held by Christie’s South Kensington 17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) on December 14.

UK: SPECIALIST auctioneers Tool Shop Auctions (10 per cent buyer’s premium) finished the year with an 1100-lot dispersal on December 4 at Needham Market Suffolk, where a UK bidder beat an American rival to the top seller, this extremely rare boxwood Ultimatum brace, right, by William Marples.