UK

NOT one of the best silver and jewellery sales ever to have been held at Phillips, Leeds – most entries sold at under £1000 – there was nevertheless some keen buying with a very satisfactory 89 per cent success rate and the occasional prized item.

UK: NINETEENTH century genre paintings with strong narrative and moralising elements have not been the strongest performers at auction in recent years.

UK: MARCH was a busy month in London and successful with it. On the 15th, Spink (15 per cent buyer’s premium) sold the definitive collection of Tudor silver coins formed over several decades by Roger Shuttlewood.

There was the familiar wide mix and flash of quality at this Dales auctioneers’ weekly sale, where the top price came from a piece over the Pennines – an 18th century yew wood dresser base that had originally graced a pub in Blackpool.

UK: A CHANNEL Islands collection formed by Sir Martin Le Quesne occupied the first 108 lots of the catalogue issued by Bloomsbury Book Auctions for their March 15 sale.

In a Bloomsbury Book Auctions sale reported earlier (Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1485, April 21, 2001) I mentioned a bid of £2800 on a 1930 (German text) Cranach Press edition of Hamlet, but at Sotheby’s on April 5, as part of the John Gielgud Collection, a copy of the English text version made very much more than that.

AFTER a slow start, this Henley event picked up with the furniture section in which an early 18th century 2ft 5in (74cm) wide oak chest of three drawers with original handles, shot past its £300-500 estimate to sell at £3100.

UK: Sworders, Stansted: A mammoth 1200 lots made up the March dispersal by the Essex auctioneers and there were some real quality pieces among them, both in the ceramics and the furniture.

UK: THE best ever attended sale at Newent Auction Rooms (5 per cent buyer’s premium) on the March 30th – auctioneer John Parrott frankly believed numbers at the March 30 event were boosted by foot-and-mouth cancellations elsewhere – was led by this pretty Queen Anne walnut desk.

UK: ARTS Minister Alan Howarth has become increasingly active in placing temporary bans on the export of works of art

To what extent the bouyant market for Gaudy Welsh pottery would become deflated if every American collector realised it was actually made in Staffordshire, England, not Wales, is a pertinent question – given the misty eyed view of Scottish/Welsh/Irish history from the other side of pond.

THE star of this 476-lot Kent sale arrived late and direct from a tractor shed where it had languished for a decade.

UK: SMALLER than usual at 412 lots – the Sussex floods earlier in the year having distracted potential vendors – the March sale at Henry Adams’ Chichester rooms was nevertheless strong on quality, which is what buyers want.

Sotheby’s find a warm welcome in Wales with record bid and active museum interest UK: THE strong, and occasionally extraordinary, demand for Celtic art, both Scottish and Irish, has been a feature of the art market for years and has warranted specialist picture sales devoted to those country’s painters.

UK: A NEWLY established firm of provincial auctioneers are broadening the scope of their business by launching a two-day ceramics fair in London in June.

THE Portable Antiquities scheme, which protects archaeological finds in the UK, has announced a 50 per cent rise in reports of discovered artefacts for the past year.

Few businesses can boast the sort of charitable contributions of Tomlinson Antiques, the furniture wholesaler of Tockwith, North Yorkshire.

UK: BY the time you read this, the Kent and Medway Bills should have passed into law, with Royal Assent being given on Tuesday, April 10, although there will be a six-month delay until it can be enforced.

Toy soldiers and figures There was a larger than usual civilian element to the latest sale of toy soldiers and figures, held by Christie’s South Kensington on March 30.

The contents and joints are loose and the upper hinge is nearly detached, but the maroon cloth gilt binding of this 1890 first issue of what was only Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four, are pretty good and this copy sold at Dominic Winter for £3000 to Bromlea & Jonkers.