Decorative Art

After 44 years working as an auction house specialist, John Sandon has chosen to retire from his post as international director of glass and British ceramics at Bonhams.

While Sotheby’s and Christie’s no longer hold regular dedicated auctions of European ceramics, they still cater for elements of this market in their main centres worldwide via series of mixed-discipline traditional decorative arts auctions.

Keys’ fine sale on July 24-26 will include more examples of porcelain from the local Lowestoft factory.

A c.1946 Italian wrought-iron dressing table was among the stand-out sales during the spring Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair in Battersea.

While dedicated sales of English and Continental ceramics are rarer beasts in the saleroom calendar these days, the traditional mixed-discipline regional sales are a repository for plenty of material from the main factories of the 18th and 19th centuries.

A good example of the attraction of a dated and named inscription was evident at Woolley & Wallis’ (25% buyer’s premium) recent ceramics auction in Salisbury.

A matched pair of Chelsea mugs cropped up in an Andrew Smith’s (21% buyer’s premium) sale in Hampshire.

Henry Aldridge & Son will offer items from the Skidmore collection at its May 18 sale – including these pieces of late 19th century Chinese ‘export’ silver.

Opening the antique ceramics section of Lawrences’ (25% buyer’s premium) four-day sale in Crewkerne was the William Farrar Jackson collection of commemorative English pottery.

A pair of Worcester dishes of so-called ‘Blind Earl’ form was a best-seller in the ceramics section that opened Dreweatts’ (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) spring sale.

In today’s world when employment fluidity is the norm, it is rare to find someone who had been in the same job and place all their working life. But when he hung up his hat last week from his role as international director of glass and British ceramics at Bonhams, John Sandon had clocked up almost 44 years, man and boy, in the same saddle.

The latest version of Christie’s (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) Collector sale in New York featured an interesting collection of equine pottery: an ensemble of 10 large-scale English pearl ware horses, the majority made in the Leeds pottery in the first half of the 19th century.

In his annual exhibition, Battersea folk art dealer Robert Young offers a primitive livestock painting of a brown and white cow which was once as obscure in appearance as in its history.

Included in a mixed-discipline sale held in Paris by Daguerre (28% buyer’s premium inc VAT) at Drouot was a Sèvres bough pot in soft paste porcelain.

The highlight of a dedicated ceramics sale held at Drouot by Fraysse (22.17% buyer’s premium) was this large 16 x 22in (41 x 56cm) early French, Moustiers, faience basin made at the Clerissy factory.

Although catalogued as 19th century, this horn, fruitwood and bone inlaid oval patch or snuff box offered by Rogers Jones in Colwyn Bay in north Wales is of a type associated with the late 17th century.

Underpinned by bids from the internet, silver from beyond the British Isles is these days a stronger feature of provincial sales.

Russian works of art are coming up for sale at Dr Fischer in Heilbronn on May 17.

It is thought that the prestigious Meissen designer Johann Joachim Kaendler drew the inspiration for his teapot in the form of a reclining cockerel from a Chinese model he found in the royal collection in Dresden.

Satirical magazine Private Eye once ran a series highlighting the fatuity of interviews by supposedly asking famous names their feelings towards spoons, there being nothing more mundane or less worthy of comment. But the appeal of an antique spoon to the cognoscenti is not difficult to appreciate.