UK

NOW in its 15th year, and after a few hiccups, the 20/21 British Art Fair has been on a roll for the past couple of years and its popularity should only be enhanced by its move to the Common-wealth Institute in Kensington High Street, London W8, where it will run from September 18 to 22.

Sold for £180 as part of a Hamptons sale on August 1 was the handbill exhorting Englishmen! to take up arms against Napoleon, right.

The four-day Decorex International interior design trade fair runs this year from September 22-25 at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea.

WHILE prices for run-of-the-mill silver have been all but flat-lining since the extraordinary Seventies boom, there are welcome blips from time to time to show the market isn’t quite dead.

LONDON antique dealer Robert Hirschhorn lives in his showroom and it is the interior of his Camberwell Georgian town house which exemplifies his look, which he terms “Smart Country”.

The Margaret Cadman Collection - Preview: The short supply of good quality period ceramics (indeed of all antiques) compared to the golden era of past collecting is a constant lament these days and one often wonders just what has happened to all of them? For several thousand pieces the answer is that they have been squirrelled away for decades in a large Victorian house on the South Coast.

WHEN Tom Crowther founded Crowther of Syon Lodge dealing in antique chimneypieces in 1876, the prevailing design trends were moving from Gothic Revival to Aesthetic, and over the next 125 years the Middlesex firm have serviced every subsequent design trend.

MANY auctioneers decide against holding sales in August, traditionally the quietest month of the auction calender. These Staffordshire auctioneers, Richard Winterton chose to go ahead with their monthly sales which, as so often throughout the year, was led by brown furniture.

The Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair, the event that pioneered the decorative look for antiques fairs and the first to realise the growing importance of the interior design trade, celebrates its autumn staging this month at its Battersea Park marquee from September 24-29.

It wasn’t until Campbell Archibald Mellon (1876-1955) retired from business at the end of the First World War that he devoted himself to painting. He moved to Gorleston-on-Sea in Norfolk and the bulk of his artistic output is focused on the beaches and holidaymakers in the area.

THE sale on August 16 was the first time Bonhams, Honiton (17.5% buyer’s premium) had held a specialist collectors’ sale without cigarette and postcards after the decision was made to sell these at New Bond Street. With the sale now focused firmly on Goss and crested china, pot lids, Prattware and commemorative ceramics, lots of new buyers flooded in making the sale a big success.

A 19th century Aesthetic movement ebonised Japanesque cabinet was orginally housed in the Yorkshire home of a Mr Mossman, a wealthy Leeds wool merchant. When he moved from his house in Menston, near Ilkley, the cabinet passed into the hands of the new owner, the well-known music critic Ernest Bradbury and has passed by descent ever since.

A second hand bookshop in Glasgow and two dealers are locked in a legal dispute over the ownership of a lost cache of William Blake watercolours, valued at over £1m.

From the lakes of Killarney to the golf links of St Andrews via the Norfolk Broads, there is hardly any corner of Ireland and the British Isles that is not covered by Christie’s South Kensington’s sale of Travel Posters, which takes place next week on September 12.

THIS month, the international autumn fairs season gets seriously under way and the marker for the off in London is the country’s longest continually running event, the twice-yearly Chelsea Antiques Fair which will return to Chelsea Old Town Hall in the King’s Road for the 95th time from September 13 to 22.

THIRD time lucky for the annual Antiques For Everyone – Scotland fair, held at Glasgow’s Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre from August 23 to 25.

THE highlight of the wide-ranging 1400-lot collectors’ sale held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt (15% buyer’s premium) at Taunton on July 20, was a Morris Minor 1000, from the Matchbox series, crucially painted in pale brown.

NEARLY 40 years after 15 men stole 120 mail bags containing £2.6m from the Royal Mail train as it passed through the Buckinghamshire countryside, the Great Train Robbery can still arouse controversy. In 1969 the police held an auction of items found in the robbers’ hideout on behalf of the banks who lost money.

This large Highland hunting landscape by John Frederick Herring Senior proved to be the highlight of Sotheby’s annual auction series held last week at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland, when it sold for £470,000 (plus 19.5/10% premium) to London dealer Richard Green Fine Art bidding on the phone.

LONDON: THE Greenwich Development Agency has just published a new guide in a bid to boost the trade in antiques and collectables in the south east London borough.