UK

TWO well-known organisers, Towy Antiques Fairs and Sue Ede, have joined forces as the Towy Ede Partnership to launch a new programme of fairs. The first date will be the Newbury Antiques Fair, a weekend event to be held at the Newbury Racecourse on June 15 and 16.

FLOOD waters threatened to sink a £1m antiques emporium just weeks after its official launch. The flowing lines of antique and interior design dealers Mansers’ new showroom on the outskirts of Shrewsbury echo those of an ocean liner, but Mother Nature added the final touch when the River Severn burst its banks last Tuesday, leaving the new building seemingly afloat in the turbid waters around the historic Shropshire county town.

While it is almost impossible to sell some routine furniture at present, Keys specialist Paul Goodley echoed the traditional view that attractively pitched guidelines are the key to success.

ELEVEN top dealers make their debut at this summer’s Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair and it is clear that the organisers of our most prestigious event have taken the opportunity to beef up their fine art quota.

NOT the priciest offering at Exeter auctioneers Hampton & Littlewood (15% buyer’s premium) on January 30, but undoubtedly the most interesting was this early 19th century automaton right, made from bone.

Sotheby’s have responded to the threat of legal action over alleged price fixing at UK auctions, playing down the claims of legal firm Class Law.

BOOKS played a fairly minor part in the first Newbury antiques sale of the year at Dreweatt Neate on 30 January – one that raised in excess of £1.5m, a record for the Berkshire saleroom – but they did get the proceedings under way, and the very first lot in the catalogue, a misbound and now disbound and browned copy of Love in a Village, a comic opera as performed at The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden... showed the way in selling for a double estimate £200.

In 1805, William Blake was commissioned by Robert Harley Cromek to make a set of 40 drawings to illustrate Robert Blair’s poem The Grave, 20 of which Cromek proposed to have engraved by Blake.

Anyone looking at this small 19th century still life painting, right, for the first time could be forgiven for rubbing their eyes with disbelief to hear that East Sussex auctioneers Gorringe’s (15% buyer’s premium) had allocated it an estimate of £20,000-30,000 at their January 29-31 sale in Lewes.

Rise of Winifred Nicholson goes on apace with amazing bid of £100,000 for portrait of Ben: Over the last two or three years Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981), the first wife of Ben Nicholson, has become an increasingly significant figure in the Modern British market, culminating in the record £52,000 paid last July at Phillips for one of her trademark window still lives.

Buying art as an investment has always been a perilous business. Back in the 1920s during the so-called Etching Boom speculating collectors were prepared to pay hundreds of pounds – ie more than the price of an average London house – for single prints by ultra- fashionable artists such as Muirhead Bone, David Young Cameron and James McBey.

UK: Thornhill Galleries are a 120-year-old British company that specialise in architectural antique interior design. They make panelled rooms on commission in antique pine and seasoned hardwood and carry a wide stock of period fireplaces and accessories, garden statuary and other architectural features.

Pictured right is one of Twelve Angels, 9ft 10in (3m) high towering chairs made of dried branches that look like sinuous dancers. They are the work of Polish designer Dorota Koziara and three of these are among the more striking furniture forms to be found in CDA 2002, the 6th annual exhibition of Contemporary Decorative Arts and Design that opens at Sotheby’s Bond Street Galleries on February 20 and runs until March 1.

The Wiltshire rooms Woolley & Wallis usually hold four specialist carpet sales a year but a fifth was squeezed in before the scheduled Valentine’s Day event, and with a 77 per cent rate and £77,000 total on the 284 lots on offer, the decision by specialists June Barrett and Ian Bennett was more than justified.

A privately sourced collection of jewellery boosted this first dispersal of the year in these Hampshire rooms at George Kidner on 9 January – “the bulk of the rest of the material was just good stock pieces”, said auctioneer Andrew Reeves.

THIS first sale of the new year at the Staffordshire rooms Richard Winterton attracted a number of new buyers who were all in the area for the LAPADA fair at the nearby Birmingham NEC.

The most recent of the three annual Olympia fairs, the Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair, which runs at the West London exhibition halls from February 26 to March 3, is a mix of traditional and modern very much with the decorator in mind.

London’s first costume and textile sale of the year took place at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) at the end of January, the 318 lots netting just over £150,000 with an 87 per cent take-up by lottage, 89 in money.

The London art market received a major lift in the salerooms last week when Sotheby’s and Christie’s attracted remarkably strong levels of international demand for their February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary auctions.

LAWYERS say that Sotheby’s and Christie’s can expect to face a £100m lawsuit over price-fixing at UK auctions within the next few weeks.