Asian Art

It’s a rare sale these days at which an English furniture standard challenges quality Chinese pieces for price, but the top end of the trade certainly rated a 6ft 3in (1.9m) William and Mary walnut and featherbanded bureau cabinet offered by Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium).

The US-China trade war, previously the stuff of new technology, heavy industry and agribusiness, has now opened a new front: cultural heritage. The threat of a 25% tariff on imported Chinese art and antiques will soon be discussed in Washington, DC.

Cirencester saleroom Moore Allen & Innocent (20% buyer’s premium) enjoyed a taste of India’s fast-growing art market when three pictures by the Indian folk artist Jamini Roy (1887-1972) were scooped up for a total of £24,500.

Asian Art in London, the event that promotes London as the centre of the global Asian art trade, has increased the number of its auction house participants for the 21st edition (November 1-10).

Brian Morgan was a leading Oriental art dealer, a president of the British Antiques Dealers’ Association and set up the Friends of the BADA Trust, a charitable organisation.

“The best piece in the sale,” enthused auctioneer Richard Harrison in reference to a Meiji Kazaridana cabinet sold for £11,000 at Mitchells (20% buyer’s premium) at Cockermouth on June 13-15.

Stuttgart auction house Nagel (33% buyer’s premium) held its summer sale of Asian art in Salzburg having acquired an impressive array of quality pieces from European and other collections.

A long-running legal dispute over a Fatimid rock crystal ewer that had been due to sell at Sotheby’s has been settled in court.

The 195-lot collection of mask netsuke amassed by Swiss entrepreneur Peter Müller met with mixed success when offered by Matthew Barton (24% buyer’s premium).

"He had taken a taxi from Heathrow to Easingwold. After fierce bidding on the phones and internet he bought it, put it in his suitcase and the taxi was still waiting outside the saleroom with the meter ticking to go back to Heathrow.”

Chinese art specialist Priestley & Ferraro has moved to a new location in St James’s. The new address is 3 Bury Street, not far from 17 King Street where it had been located since 1996.

Results for Kakiemon and Meiji metalwork underline stronger market for Asia’s ‘second tier’