News

FRANCE: RARELY can so many leading lights in the international art and antiques business have been gathered in the same room as happened at the luxurious George V hotel in Paris on Tuesday, October 3.

UK: THE Court of Appeal has set a precedent under case law which forces auctioneers to sell to the highest bidder where a reserve has not been set, regardless of how low the winning bid is.

LONDON: Renaissance period combined scaphe dial and astrolabe made by Arsenius of Louvain, dated 1563.

UK: THE Thames-side meadows at Christopher Gibbs’ Manor House in Oxfordshire contained a number of pieces of classical statuary with important provenances, but none proved so valuable as this unheralded stone model of a recumbent cow.

Sotheby’s board of directors have approved payment of $256m to clients in the civil lawsuit which claimed collusion with Christie’s in setting charges for buyers in 1992 and sellers in 1995.

UK: The first celebrity house sale of the new millennium took place last week near Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire, where noted aesthete and furnisher to the stars Christopher Gibbs was clearing his Victorian manor house under the auspices of Christie’s.

FRANCE: A fire on September 10 at a storage warehouse used by the Hôtel Drouot at Le Blanc Mesnil, 10 miles north-east of Paris, destroyed goods consigned to five different commissaires-priseurs by some 800 clients.