News

UK: POOR old Neville Chamberlain. He always takes the blame for all but delivering up the British people to Adolf Hitler, when perhaps he should really be seen merely as one of those Edwardian throwbacks like Eden who believed, quite rightly, that there was no aspect of a fascist dictatorship which could threaten the lifestyle of the English upper classes.

US & FRANCE: TWO works by Philippe de Champaigne have been withdrawn from the sale of the Karl Lagerfeld collection, in New York on May 23, and offered to the French State.

UK: THE designs of Charles Rennie Mackintosh are normally associated with stellar prices in the salerooms, but this stained birch day bed struggled to get away at Lyon and Turnbull’s Glasgow sale of Decorative Arts on April 18 and indeed had experienced a fair degree of ignorance or neglect in the course of its history.

UK: LEADING London art dealer Simon Dickinson has announced the sale to the Brooklyn Museum of Art of the 14th century Florentine gold ground painting of Christ in Majesty which he bought for £66,000 at Dorchester rooms of Hy. Duke & Son on March 9

US: NEW York financier Saul Steinberg is to sell his collection of 61 Old Master paintings through the New York art dealer Richard Feigen. With obvious carrots dangled by the leading auction houses for such an important collection, conservatively valued at some $52m, this is a major fillip for the fine art trade.

UK: TO the businessman in late 18th century rural England, these porcelain tokens would only have been worth a couple of shillings each, but to bidders at Dreweatt Neate’s Banbury salerooms on March 29 their value was to be measured in thousands of pounds.

UK: LEADING representatives of the trade have given evidence before the Culture Select Committee which is considering whether Britain should introduce new laws to tackle art theft and trade in illegally exported antiques.