News

UK: DESPITE the irritation of losing contact with a US telephone bidder on the way, the auctioneers managed to secure a bid of £3500 from Arden on the principal colour plate lot in the sale – a six volume, second series set of J-J.Linden’s Iconographie des Orchidées of 1895-1900, presenting 273 chromolitho plates.

UK: THE art trade generally classifies pictures as being either “commercial” or “academic” and it was generally the later term which best described the quality on offer at Phillips’ (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) March 19 sale of The Lloyd Collection of pictures in Oxford.

UK: TOP LOT in this sale was a 1668 edition of Gervase Markham’s A Way to get Wealth, a ‘nonce’ collection, first issued in 1623, which incorporates half a dozen works by this important but prolific and commercially inventive writer on agriculture, who was not averse to putting different titles to what were essentially the same works or to re-issuing unsold copies of new books under new titles.

UK: THE Government has saved one of Van Dyck’s finest paintings for the nation and is blocking the export of two further paintings, a Rembrandt and a Ben Nicholson.

UK: NEXT year, with the beginning of a new millennium, 19th century furniture will seem far older than it actually is. But for some time now the finer pieces have been making prices comparable to their 18th century exemplars and this was certainly the case when this late 19th century satinwood and mahogany breakfront bookcase came up for sale at Heathcote Ball (10 per cent buyer’s premium) in Leicester on February 25.

The Ultimate Corkscrew Book by Donald A Bull

- Raymond Chandler on the English US: IN MY LAST American round-up, I reported on the sale at Swanns of an early printing of the Treaty of Paris that had been owned by the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, a now largely forgotten but once key political and spiritual figure in the War of Independence.