Ceramics

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back into the softening Martinware market, along comes a £26,000 spoon-warmer.

WHEN a market softens, it is often best to return to first principles – the core values of condition, market freshness and pricing that can be overlooked when an area of collecting really ‘takes off’.

ELIZABETH Craven was no shrinking violet, even when judged by the freer moral standards of 18th century England.

THERE was high drama at the Mackworth Hotel, Derbyshire on April 15 when a creamware teapot and cover carrying a telling political message sold for £69,000.

DEMAND for Martin Brothers pottery may have tapered off slightly but it still provided three of the top prices at Bonhams’ recent Ceramic Design sale.

NO-ONE seemed to be in doubt about the quality of Sevi Guatelli’s Clarice Cliff collection.

When an impressive Wedgwood Fairyland lustre vase featured on the latest edition of The Antiques Roadshow, valuer Stephen Moore (of Anderson & Garland, Newcastle) wanted to suggest it could bring £10,000-15,000.

Melting bidders' hearts in a snow-covered Dorchester, this rare Doulton figure of a little girl cradling a doll proved the star attraction at Duke's sale on February 5-6.

Readers are being urged to be aware of a new batch of counterfeit Troika wares that are being offered for sale on eBay.

The evocatively named Pickleherring factory is one of the earliest known locations where English delftware was produced.

This monumental 19th century Russian gilt-bronze mounted porcelain vase, created by the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg, is thought to have been included in the wedding dowry of a daughter of Tsar Nicholas I.

Latest results now prompt a rethink in London on English porcelain as East Anglian enthusiasts take pride in collecting local factory’s output.

Auction Atrium are to hold a two-part evening course on English and Continental Porcelain.

Royal Worcester porcelain is one of those collecting areas which is plentiful enough in its many different ornamental styles to support a wide collecting base. There are buyers for all the different forms, from George Owen’s scarce reticulated vases to Doris Lindner’s equestrian models.

The volume of artist Louis Wain’s distinctive ceramic animals making a sudden appearance on the market has raised the possibility that some could be reproductions or fakes. Seven have been offered at various UK salerooms in the last month, while two suspect examples have already been pulled from a Bonhams sale.

A YORKSHIRE dealer lost a lifetime's collection in one night when thieves stole the bulk of his Clarice Cliff stock built up over the last 25 years. Art Deco dealer Muir Hewitt lost around 55 pieces of Clarice Cliff when the thieves targeted his shop in the Redbrick Mill in Batley in the early hours of July 26.

THIS pottery figure of a cat is among the rarest of the Cubist-style felines designed by Louis Wain for the Austrian manufacturer Amphora.

Christie’s English furniture day on June 18 was marked by the £9m auction of a dozen pieces of top-flight examples and by the 369-lot £13.6m sale of the collection of the late Simon Sainsbury.

Yet another example of a British auction house benefiting from the craze for all things Russian was seen at Welsh auctioneers Rogers Jones of Colwyn Bay on May 27, when international interest clamoured for this Russian plate.

Stockspring Antiques will host a loan exhibition entitled The Early James Giles and his Contemporary London Decorators from June 5 to 17 at 114 Kensington Church Street, London.