UK

THE first UK clocks and watches sale after the summer lull presented a good opportunity to examine the health of a market which is notoriously prone to ups and downs. From results at Gardiner Houlgate, Bath, it would seem that the trade in gentleman’s pocket watches remains buoyant, while ladies’ wristwatches are still hard to shift.

From the day it was delivered to Lord Yarborough in 1826, this Benjamin Vulliamy travelling clock had remained in the same family until it was sold at Hy Duke’s sale in Dorchester on September 20.

AFTER this year the 20/21 British Art Fair will move from the Royal College of Art in Kensington Gore, London SW7 to the Commonealth Institute, Kensington High Street, W8.

When this walnut chair arrived at Shanklin Auction Rooms (10 per cent premium) on the Isle of Wight it was catalogued as Victorian and expected to fetch £400-600. However, specialist dealers who viewed it before the September 4 sale noted its clean, classical lines its ebony strung motifs and, most significantly, the wrap-around back.

A clutch of Oriental entries were among the more interesting works in the Amersham Auction Rooms’ otherwise run-of-the-mill offering of 324 antiques and collectables on 2 August.

Themed series are all the rage in the salerooms these days. September 25-28 has been designated Travel Week by Christie’s King Street rooms and will be given over to a series of sales devoted to voyages, exploration and discovery.

Porcelain toys are the tiny versions of tablewares produced by ceramic factories alongside their standard size wares. The earliest 18th century examples, often less than an inch in height, were probably made to furnish dolls’ or baby houses, which were initially playthings for adults rather than children.

Pictured are two modern firsts, both in rather chipped jackets, from the book section of a September 7 sale held by Mallams of Oxford. P.G. Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred in Springtime of 1939 was sold for £100, while Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop of the previous year reached £210.

Sotheby’s annual jaunt north of the border to Gleneagles is as traditional to the Scottish leg of the ‘Season’ as the Oban ball and the first flexing of the Duke of Edinburgh’s trigger finger on the moors above Balmoral.

Good stock furniture attracted bidders to the first of these Staffordshire August sales on 15 August at Richard Wintertons, the best being a George III mahogany sofa table.

Waddesdon Manor, the Rothschilds’ country estate in Buckinghamshire, has come over all fashionable. The theme for their 2001 season is Art in Fashion. In the garden, the parterre has been given over to the talents of fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who has designed two vibrantly coloured rainbow displays of carpet bedding.

FAIRLY routine furniture and modest pictures predictably took most of the higher prices at this Brightwells 850-lot sale in Herefordshire on 15-16 August but a couple of unusual items among the silver and the objets d’art were the eye-catchers.

SPECIALIST collectors and dealers don’t seem to have a closed season, certainly not in the arms and armour world and they turned up in strength at Weller & Dufty in Birmingham on 25 July.

DAVID Lay’s trawls through Cornwall to mount regular sales like this 2000-lot marathon on 16-17 July usually throw up something special but here it was a case of piling ’em high and selling ’em reasonable.

JUST opened in an unprepossessing 1970s gasworks laboratory on the Fulham/Chelsea divide is Core One, a collective of five very unconventional antique dealers who specialise in items old and new for the decorator.

THE two-day Staffordshire sale at Wintertons on 25-26 July was, at just under 800 lots, not perhaps quite a giant sale but it certainly covered the range of lower and middle-priced antiques.

AT the second outing Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow confirmed its status as Scotland’s top fair and certainly enough business was achieved by enough of the 170 exhibitors at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre to indicate a secure future for this new fixture.

With their sinister gliding gait and shrill cries of Exterminate! Exterminate! the Daleks sent small children cowering behind the sofa when they first appeared on TV in the 1960s in their bid to rule the Universe. At approximately 8in (20cm) high, however, this particular example of spin-off merchandising from the BBC series Dr Who is more likely to invoke fond nostalgia than fear.

UK: LONDON’s art world was reeling last week with the shock announcement from Anthony d’Offay, one of the country’s leading and most influential contemporary art dealers, that he was to retire and close his West End galleries at the end of the year.

AS in Edinburgh, strong private bidding for local favourites dominated the picture section of Andrew Hartley’s (10% buyer’s premium) August 15 sale in well-heeled Ilkley, West Yorkshire.