Furniture

MAHOGANY is synonymous with the finest 18th century English furniture and its supreme place in English furniture history is celebrated from April 8 to 25 with a selling exhibition, Magnificent Mahogany – Two Centuries of English Furniture, at Mayfair’s Windsor House Antiques.

The doom and gloom experienced in many provincial rooms prior to Christmas was nowhere to be seen in these Sussex rooms, who, despite the snowy conditions, took a respectable hammer total just shy of £170,000.

To date this year Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) have held five sales of furniture and carpets. These weekly sales are making a return to their Knightsbridge rooms for the first time in around 20 years after a recent peripatetic period of moving from Chelsea – their long time abode – to Bayswater and briefly back to Chelsea again.

It’s QUESTIONABLE how much influence a piece of furniture could have upon the writer using it, but certainly when the writer in question is Graham Greene, a writer of that fame can certainly influence the fate of a piece of furniture.

“SELECTIVE” can mean “poor” when auctioneers apply the word to bidding and the downward spiral of brown furniture prices has emphasised this. But it was an accurate enough description of bidding on furniture offered among the 1200 lots at the Clifton rooms, for when there was a piece of unusual quality it sold well.

The easel that was used to create some of the most celebrated nursery images of the 20th century will be going under the hammer later on this month.

One of the most unusual and interesting pieces in Sotheby’s December 11 sale of Continental furniture was the 19th century English boulle cabinet shown right set with a rare 17th century Dutch mother-of-pearl and hardstone inlaid panel depicting a Vanitas subject.

Continental Furniture: Christie’s offered a concentration of furnishings from Continental Europe on December 12, kicking off with a select 114-lot, separately catalogued morning session devoted entirely to French furniture, with a larger 240-odd lots drawn from across the European spectrum in the afternoon.

Unsigned Arts & Crafts metalwork has lately been getting the sort of high prices normally reserved for attributable material and this copper-mounted mirror, right, was no exception – the sleeper of Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) sale of Decorative Arts at Glasgow School of Arts on November 28.

Coming up in Galashiels... The Yorkshire Arts and Crafts cabinetmaker Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson hardly needs an introduction. His distinctive adzed oak furniture, each piece relief-carved with a small mouse, proved so successful that a menagerie of imitators sprang up in the 1950s and ’60s.

Just where were those bears made? The familiar stands, seats and other furnishings fashioned as realistically carved bears, usually from limewood, have traditionally been attributed to the Black Forest region of West Germany but recent researches suggest that Switzerland is a more likely source.

The table pictured right was very much the star entry in a 230-lot sale of English and Continental furniture and works of art held at Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) Bond Street rooms on November 26. It singled handedly accounted for a third of the entire £787,620 auction total when it made £260,000. Nothing else came near this in price, the next most expensive entry being a £19,000 Louis XV period marquetry commode.

Birmingham auctioneers Fellows & Sons (15% buyer’s premium) are particularly known for their silver and jewellery sales but on October 29 it was a piece of furniture which took the top honours. A William and Mary walnut and crossbanded chest on stand had made £3400 when it was auctioned in 1998 by James & Lister Lea of Birmingham as part of the estate of the Late Mrs Joyce Cadbury of the Bourneville-based chocolate dynasty. Here it was punchily estimated at £4500-5500.

FOR a while now wicker furniture has been fashionable. It dates back to Ancient Egypt and from the 1870s to the 1930s was very popular indeed, moving indoors from the porch and summer house and being used extensively in cruise liners and airships.

With the recent closure of numerous manufacturing depots belonging to a Cardiff company, the time came to dispose of items from the manager’s flat. The best of these items, all of which were sold on November 20 at the Cardiff rooms of Anthemion Auctions, was this Regency mahogany secretaire bookcase.

FACING up to the decline in demand for brown furniture was the central issue taxing the National Association of Valuers and Auctioneers (NAVA) at their annual general meeting in Cardiff.

While many provincial auctioneers berate the slowing down of the brown furniture market, Phillip Taubenheim of Gloucestershire auctioneers Wotton Auction Rooms (10% buyer’s premium) is finding it pretty healthy. “As long as we are realistic with our vendors and they are realistic with us, everything seems to be OK,” he said.

Robert Finan has been holding these specialist sales at the Ship Hotel for six years and next year intends to go quarterly. With the major UK auctioneers having shipped their tribal art departments to Continental Europe and America, the valuer’s biannual outings are just about the only chance for the serious connoisseur to root out African totems and Maori weapons from the colonial timecapsules of the British countryside.

Auctioneers Walker Barnett & Hill (buyer’s premium 15 per cent) were understandably celebrating their decision not to break up the contents of WTM Snape’s Tea and Coffee Merchants of Queen Street, Wolverhampton, right, when they were put up for sale on September 30.

Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons was the venue on the evening of October 29 for the sale by Thomson, Roddick and Medcalf of four important and original wallpaper designs by William Morris (1834-1896).