Fine Art

TWENTY of London's top art dealers have joined forces with the auction houses to launch Master Paintings Week in London this summer.

BY 1780, John Trumbull (1756-1843), a budding young artist from Lebanon, Connecticut who had sketched the Revolutionary War, found himself in grave difficulty.

IT doesn’t happen very often that either Sotheby’s or Christie’s can claim a major sales victory over their rivals, but at the latest Old Masters series in New York one side came out the clear winners.

A major new conference for antiques and fine art auctioneers will take place at the Hilton Hotel, Birmingham, NEC on Friday, April 24.

STAYING topical but putting a comic slant on events, an exhibition of original artwork for cartoons relating to financial and political crises will be a feature of The Watercolour & Drawings Fair next February.

A retired Massachusetts lawyer found guilty of involvement in a major art theft that extends back three decades has been sentenced to seven years in a Federal prison.

A Borders property provided Thomson Roddick (15% buyer's premium) with a sensational discovery for their sale in Rosewell, Edinburgh on December 4.

A FAMILY feud has led to yet another cancellation of the sale of 63 works of art by Oskar Schlemmer, one of the central figures of the Bauhaus.

BY the time sale day came around, Holloways of Banbury knew they had something special on their hands.

Old Masters provided some solace for the London auction rooms last week, posting the solid totals and some eye-catching prices to suggest this most established of markets will ride the downturn better than its modern counterparts.

In a week that saw the London salerooms offering their traditional December round of Old Master pictures, continental furniture and works of art, one of the strongest prices proved to be the £1m (plus premium) paid for this lively and intriguing 3ft (90cm) high bacchic bronze at Sotheby's on December 2.

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.

Colnaghi-Bernheimer of London and Salomon Lilian of Amsterdam have unveiled a rare religious painting by the Dutch 17th century master Frans Hals.

with buy-in rates exceeding 60 per cent at many sales, Russian Week in London proved this hitherto burgeoning market to be as vulnerable to the economic crisis as any other.

FOUND hanging in a Boston bathroom, the whereabouts of this Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898) illustration had been a mystery for more than 80 years. Entitled The Climax, and hanging in the lavatory alongside another Beardsley pen-and-ink drawing called A Platonic Lament, the owners had no idea of its significance.

SOTHEBY'S keenly anticipated sale of the collection of the late Sir David and Lady Scott on November 19 provided a confidence-boosting result. Any pre-sale fears that the ‘unfashionable’ Victorian pictures it contained might damage results were soon put aside.

The falling stock markets that have dented the wealth of Russia’s rich have yet to impinge upon the appetite for the output of Karl Fabergé.

THE latest series of contemporary art auctions in New York showed how much the market has fallen since its peak. With sale totals down well over 50 per cent from last year’s autumn series held at the height of the boom, the extent of the damage caused by the current economic distress and diminished confidence amongst buyers was manifest. The question now is will prices stabilise or fall further?

A Mary Fedden watercolour is among the items for sale on the philanthropic auction site www.buyoncegivetwice.co.uk

COMING just hours after the election of Barack Obama in the US, a poster of the new President-elect sold at Bonhams & Butterfields in California for a double-estimate $4800 (£3145).