Bellmans

Accounts of youthful travels in Britain and on a Grand Tour contain often blunt assessments

Guangzhou bracket example leads a selection of stand-out timepieces sold in the regions.

It’s been a challenging couple of decades for classic English furniture but early winter has witnessed a few stars across the provinces, be it classic English or more exotic overseas material, to offer some gleams of encouragement.

Adding a classical touch to a highly successful five-day sale at West Sussex auction house Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) was a 1st century AD Greco-Roman marble lower torso of Aphrodite.

The year after Cedric Morris painted his verdant Foxgloves in 1932, a severe drought cut through much of southern Britain. The parched soil and the hardship it brought were a source of artistic inspiration for those who painted the form and the character of the rural landscape.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales below £2000, including a pen and ink wash by Paul Sandby.

Bellmans in Wisborough Green, West Sussex is to offer two watercolours by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) as part of a Fine Paintings sale on October 15. Both come from a local private collection.

An Abstract work by the 20th century Filipino artist Oscar Zalameda (1930-2010) emerged as the star lot in an interiors auction in West Sussex.

Auction house Bellmans has announced the appointment of Samantha Dunn-Davies to head its new London office in Brook Street, Mayfair.

A lot comprising 31 posters plugging top groups and festivals from 1969-72 was the major hit at Bellmans’ (22% buyer’s premium) Photographs, Posters and Prints sale.

Italian sculptors were the hottest property as garden statuary flourished at summer sales in the Home Counties.

In the 1950s French designer Raymond Cohen and his firm Cohray were producing a range of ultra-modern furniture that – although made for the machine age – were all put together by hand.

Golden Age collaboration between two London clockmakers leads a look at the market including hammer highlights, auction previews and dealer news.

Eardley Norton, who is listed at 49 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell between 1762- 94, enjoyed a reputation as a skilled mechanic and the maker of complex timepieces, sometimes with musical and astronomical movements.

The series of Victorian carriage clocks by James McCabe – the son of a Belfast clockmaker of the same name who came to London in the 1770s and worked at the Royal Exchange from 1804 – are typically beautifully made with exemplary twin fusee striking movements.

This pastel portrait of a Singaporean merchant by Percy Carpenter (1820-95) is believed to have broken a 30-year auction record for the artist.