Asian Art

JUST as Asian Art in London got underway, a surprise regional highlight emerged in Devon. A pair of 18th century Chinese Export pheasants were consigned for sale at Plymouth Auction Rooms by a local vendor, whose family had owned the birds for at least three generations.

GUERNSEY auctioneers Martel Maides look set to become the latest UK regional firm to benefit from the rise and rise of Chinese mark and period porcelain after three Yongzheng period (1723-1735) famille rose bowls were consigned by a Channel Islands family who have owned them for at least 80 years.

SOTHEBY’S latest Hong Kong Asian series saw mainland Chinese buyers come of age in the field of Imperial Chinese art.

THE new auction season kicked off in earnest in New York with one of the strongest market sectors – Asian works of art.

BRINGING bidding from different parts of the world to Mallams latest sale in Oxford, this Chinese jade censer went spectacularly over its £2000-3000 estimate on August 26.

SALISBURY auctioneers Woolley & Wallis have broken their own UK regional record with the sale last week of a Qianlong jade carving of a water buffalo for £3.4m. It establishes a massive new UK landmark for any work of art sold at auction outside London.

The Chinese ceramics and works of art market is undergoing a price readjustment after a decade of unfettered growth, a trend highlighted at the latest Asian sales series staged at Christie's Hong Kong.

BONHAMS & Butterfields saw a strong price for a Korean ceramic in their Asian works of art sale in San Francisco on December 9.

BONHAMS have created a department for modern and contemporary South Asian and Middle Eastern art.

THE discerning collection of Chinese jades, rhinoceros horn, furniture, textiles and paintings assembled 200 years ago by John Reeves has now gone under the hammer.

Liverpool World Museum’s Japanese holdings have been given a significant boost by the donation of 128 netsuke. The gift represents around half the collection of the late Jonas G Gadelius donated by his widow Gabita.

Offered at Lawrences of Crewkerne on October 16, this Ming dynasty blue and white brushwasher has Xuande (1425-1435) character marks and is of the period.

It proved, as predicted, to be the highest priced item in London Islamic week sales, but the Fatimid rock crystal ewer did not generate quite the fireworks that were expected before it came up for sale at Christie's on October 7.

Few objects evoke the richness of medieval Islamic culture as much as the small group of carved rock crystal ewers made for the court of the Fatimid rulers of Cairo in the late 10th and early 11th centuries.

London’s latest series of Islamic auctions, held from April 7-11, produced a series of record-breaking statistics. The result of the week came at Sotheby’s on April 9 when a 14 1/2in (37cm) long iron and copper key to the ka’ba, the holiest place in the Islamic world, sold for £8.2m, establishing a new auction high for any Islamic work of art.

The highlight of the Asia week series of auctions put on by the major salerooms was an impressive early Japanese wood sculpture of Buddha. It set a new auction high for a Japanese work of art when it was hammered down to the Japanese company Mitsukoshi Co Ltd for $12.8m (£6.7m) plus premium in Christie’s sale of Japanese and Korean art on March 18.

The 17.9m euro premium-inclusive total generated by Christie’s two-day sale of the ‘hidden’ collection of Charles Gillot in Paris last week may have wildly surpassed the auctioneers’ 5m euro predictions, but the performance of the 476-lot auction nonetheless ran pretty much along predicted lines.

A FRAUDSTER has tricked a US auction house into handing over a valuable Japanese artwork by posing as the representative of the buyer, an English dealer. It is thought they targeted the piece after realising that it was worth a great deal more than it sold for.

Asked to sell the contents of a holiday home in Sidmouth, Devon auctioneers Potburys were pleased to find this 181/2in (47cm) high cloisonné vase standing in the hearth as a container for fire irons.

Drama at Lawrences of Crewkerne on January 17 when this remarkable silver gilt and rock crystal vessel, left behind its estimate of just £100-200 to sell to a buyer in the room at £220,000 (plus 17.5 per cent buyer’s premium).