Decorative Art

Galerie Neuse, the German dealership based in Bremen, will be in Paris during the second half of September setting up at the Paris Galerie Aveline where it is presenting an exhibition titled 'L’Apothéose du Génie' from September 11-28.

Many of the high prices achieved at last week’s ‘celebrity’ sale titled Bob Hawke & Blanche d’Alpuget: Mementos, Curiosities, Art and Design reflected the impact of souvenir hunters, anxious to own a reminder of Australia’s former prime minister who died earlier this year. But not all of them.

Some of the rarest and most desirable of all English creamware jugs were those made for the American market. One of them, titled Signals at Portland Observatory, sold for $4400/£3600 (plus premium) at the Bourgeault-Horan auction in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

‘One-of-a-kind’ tubelined charger by Staffordshire ceramicist brings £3300 on local soil.

Highlights at Roseberys (25% buyer’s premium) brought more than the usual sense of trans-centuries time travel experienced at such auctions of 500 disparate lots.

The term ‘duty dodgers’ is applied to pieces that were not sent for assay during the period 1720-58 when a steep tax was placed on silver. Silversmiths had a variety of methods of escaping this tax – including transposing marks from small articles to large or overstriking marks from older pieces.

A selection of silver lots coming up in the salerooms.

A 9in (22cm) high Lalique clear and green glass bowl in the Gui (Mistletoe) pattern will feature in the sale to be held by Woody Auction in Douglass, Kansas, on September 7.

Jeffrey Lassaline has joined Tennants as silver and objects of vertu specialist.

Of the 24 silversmiths known to have worked in the Aberdeenshire town of Banff from the 17th century until the trade died out in the mid-1800s, William Scott the Elder is the first whose name is recorded.

A selection of stand-out auction results for silver in recent sales.

It was decades after the First Fleet landed in Sydney cove in 1788 before anything like a recognisable silver trade developed in Australia, writes Jolyon Warwick James.

Although catalogued as ‘Continental’, this mid-19th century porcelain figure of a seated semi-nude ballet dancer below carries impressed marks for the factory established by the English entrepreneur Francis Gardner in the town of Verbilki near Moscow in 1766.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

Not always predicted but overwhelming when it comes, big-money Russian interest sent a bronze equine group soaring at Dawson’s (23% buyer’s premium) in Maidenhead.

In this group of predominantly Victorian ceramics beloware two 18th century pieces: a typical polychrome delft plate of modest value and a far more commercial early English toby jug.

Michael Wilson of Highland Antiques in Aberdeen specialises in rare and collectable antique silver.

Clock produced by Englishman influential in French horology impresses in Norfolk auction.

When auctioneer Tony Pratt spotted a mysterious shape in the undergrowth of a back garden in Hythe he wasn’t expecting to uncover a very large pottery bear.