UK

UK: THE general and specialist art sales held in Swindon in December are getting fairly short shrift here – 1350 lots were offered over two days – but before this report appeared, the Wiltshire firm had already held their first sales of the new year and the last of the old must necessarily be tidied away.

UK: A SUBSTANTIAL offering of furniture, most of it 19th century and brown, received a mixed response from the Scottish and North of England trade at the last Phillips sale in Edinburgh before Christmas.

UK: TAKE a look at this meuble d’appui right, mounted with gilt, painted with flowers and inlaid with olive, plum, rosewood, purpleheart and ebony – a sumptuous piece of late 19th century Gallic furniture, n’est-ce pas?

UK: MODESTLY billed as a sale of Victorian and Later Furniture and Household Effects, this smallish event in a Suffolk town probably best known for its many antiques shops n fact combined two of the strengths of provincial auctioneers – some decent fresh-to-market period furniture to attract wide trade interest and some material guaranteed to spark bids from local enthusiasts.

UK: THE Norfolk auctioneers end their year with a typical 1400-lot, something-for-everyone sale aimed at the budget-conscious end of the market.

UK: Veteran auctioneer Jim Collingridge of Christie’s South Kensington retired last month after a 56-year career at the rostrum.

UK: QUITE possibly starting its long career as a Christmas present for a child, this Steiff teddy bear was the familiar target of collectors at the Horsham rooms of Latimers (15 per cent buyer’s premium) on December 14, the second of a two-day dispersal at this new addition to the Sussex auction world.

UK: AFFIRMING its place as the London fair which reaches the parts other fairs do not reach, the winter version of the thrice-yearly Decorative Antiques and Textiles Fair, held in its trademark marquee in Battersea Park, SW11 from January 16 to 21, once again made its distinctive mark among the first fairs of the year.

UK: DECORATIVE pieces stood out at this 1000-lot £104,000 sale of 1000 basically general lots.

UK: THE FIRST Tolkiens of 2001 combined to add £11,000 to the takings at this Bath sale.

UK: ONE CHART was very creased and there was a stain on the frontispiece that penetrated to the title page and early leaves, but the copy of Bligh’s Narrative of the Mutiny on [the...] Bounty offered in Carlisle was a tightly bound copy of the 1790 first edition in a contemporary binding of quarter calf and marbled boards, and it sold at £3150.

The Catalogue of Silver in the Grosvenor Museum, Chester by Peter Boughton, published by Phillimore & Co, Chichester. Available from the museum on 01244 402008 fax: 01244 347587 or bookshops. ISBN 186077153X £19.95 pb.

UK: SUPPLY the goods and, through hell or, in this case, high water, they will come. The new Chichester operation of Henry Adams underlined this article of auctioneering faith when at their second sale they were able to put up a good range of items sought by the middle and upper markets and, despite the serious local flooding (one would-be buyer marooned miles away phoned to complain that the sale should have been cancelled), they enjoyed a considerable success.

UK: THIS 63/4in (17cm) high striking table clock proved to be the most expensive lot in a sale of clocks and watches held by Christie’s South Kensington 17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) on December 14.

UK: LOCAL bidders accounted for most of the Oriental and European ceramics and works of art offered at Edinburgh where 306 lots totalled £75,000 but the top seller went to an English bidder.

UK: THE last of the monthly sales of collectors’ items and antiques of the year at Cirencester was dominated in visual terms by a pair of Cotswold stone columns, 7ft 6in (2.25m) high, which had been rescued by the vendor from a cowshed where they had lain for 60 years. They achieved a new-found status when they sold at £1200.

UK: THIS looks the life! Relaxed in elegant company, high above the world and its cares on a sunlit terrace with parasols and palms.

UK: SPECIALIST auctioneers Tool Shop Auctions (10 per cent buyer’s premium) finished the year with an 1100-lot dispersal on December 4 at Needham Market Suffolk, where a UK bidder beat an American rival to the top seller, this extremely rare boxwood Ultimatum brace, right, by William Marples.

UK: THE most prominent entry to this monthly two-day sale in Devon was an early 19th century linen press had come from a South Coast farmhouse.

UK: CLOSE to 640 lots were packed into the catalogue of the last Bloomsbury sale of the old year – half of them scientific and medical – but compared with the sale of the previous week, reported in Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1473, four-figure bids were few and far between.