Decorative Art

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An Elkington electroplated duck press outsold silver proper at Halls (20% buyer’s premium) of Shrewsbury on March 20.

On May 17, Cologne auction house Lempertz is selling 115 bronze mortars from the 8th-18th centuries.

Two cased Stuart Devlin silver gilt surprise eggs of unique designs sold for £4400 at 1818 Auctions (20% buyer’s premium) in Milnthorpe on April 1.

Modern British ceramics are rarely offered by German auction houses. Among the notable exceptions is the Kunst & Design Auktionshaus Schops Turowski, based in Krefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia.

On account of its relative scarcity, all Irish silver carries a premium. It is the pieces made in small provincial centres that are most highly prized.

Dr Stewart Abbott is partner at S&J Abbott Ceramics Plus, which is among the exhibitors at the upcoming Petworth Park Antiques and Fine Art Fair.