UK

On the same day that Christie’s King Street rooms were offering pieces from the upper-crust end of the portrait miniatures and vertu market, their South Kensington (17/510% buyer’s premium) rooms had a more bread-and-butter selection of the same material.

AT the time it was produced – 1930/31 – the geometric design of a Shelley tea set with triangular handles was far from popular and speedily withdrawn. Seven decades on, with Art Deco a buoyant area and Shelley becoming more in demand by collectors, the scarcity of the pattern was a considerable addition to the appeal of a tea set for six offered at Stride’s 1000-lot West Sussex sale.

Shanklin Auction Rooms have taken what they believe to be a record price for a Worcester teapot. The Isle of Wight auctioneers expected a bid of around £1000 for the rare c.1760, 5in (13cm), first period Worcester pot (pictured) and were amazed to see it knocked down to a London dealer for £11,000 (plus 10 per cent buyer’s premium).

Predating Shackleton’s famous experiments in polar printing by nearly 60 years, this is one of a group of six playbills printed in the Arctic in 1851-52, during the voyages of the Resolute and Intrepid in search of Sir John Franklin.

WITH little in the way of furniture at this 1000-lot Essex sale at Ambrose on 17-18 May it was left to jewellery to provide the higher prices and collectors’ items to provide the wider interest.

THE Metropolitan Police have announced a five-day course to provide practical solutions in the prevention and detection of art crimes.

BIRMINGHAM-based Centre Exhibitions, headed by Fran Foster, launch a new series of fairs from October 18-20 when the first Ceramics For Everyone Fair is held at The Grandstand, Worcester Racecourse.

This rare Elizabethan oak draw leaf refectory table proved to be the chief atttraction at the sale of the late Clive Sherwood’s Collection offered by Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on May 22, when it sold for a mid-estimate £55,000 to a London dealer.

BRITAIN’s leading furniture maker and designer John Makepeace calls this exotic and exquisitely crafted one-off piece of furniture English Fruits, and the circular table will be the centrepiece of a special Makepeace feature at the entrance of the Daily Telegraph/House and Garden Fair at Olympia from June 27 to 30.

TOP people’s favourite antiques event The Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair has been running since 1934, the age of Deco, and as an established part of the London Season is not the place that comes to mind when thinking of something for the decorators.

Marcel Breuer is one of the major names in furniture associated with the Bauhaus design school. When examples of his distinctive take on modernist furniture design come up for auction they regularly make substantial sums, but it is rare for an entire collection to find its way under the hammer especially a collection of specially commissioned pieces from a named provenance.

JOINING the illustrious roster of exhibitors at this month’s Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, which runs at Mayfair’s Grosvenor House Hotel from June 12 to 18, is the distinguished arms and armour dealer Peter Finer.

William Blake did not manage to persuade his non-conformist followers to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, but a Victorian carpenter came close with this davenport, right. Consigned to the May 22-23 sale held at Winterton’s (10% buyer’s premium) in Lichfield, the davenport belongs to an interesting group of 19th century olivewood furniture bearing the logo Jerusalem, written in English or Hebrew.

Buoyant as the world of Art Deco is, bidders still like familiar names, which in the world of bronze and ivory 1930s figures tend to mean Demetre Chiparus and Ferdinand Preiss.

SOME of the regular buyers at this 424-lot dispersal at BBR Auctions on 28 April deemed it the “best selection yet” even though it had fewer Prattware pot lids and less blue and white Cornishware than usual. But this was made up for with an unusually large number of pie funnels and a good range of kitchen utensils and cream pots.

The German painter Hans Purrmann (1880-1966) is described by Bénézit as an artist who was heavily influenced by Matisse (with whom he had contact in Paris from 1906-1914), but who lacked the greater artist’s “sense de lumière et de la couleur”.

THIS 438-lot Suffolk auction at Abbotts may not have been as strong as their last sale in March but this was more to do with the quality of consignments this time round than a reflection of the market.

If maritime artefacts are your thing, set sail for Christie’s South Kensington. There’s a positive marina’s worth of material on offer on June 19 in the first of their two annual sales held in London devoted to all manner of marine artefacts and paintings.

Nanking means to most people the rape of that city by the Japanese; to ceramics collectors it conjures up memories of the Nanking Cargo, but in the specialist picture market it is the place where the 1842 treaty was signed opening up five ports to British merchants “without (molestation or restraint”.

This portrait miniature of a 30-year-old lady by Nicholas Hilliard, dated 1582, set a new auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s Olympia rooms on June 6 when it sold to a private collector bidding on the phone against the room for £200,000 (plus premium).