Furniture

THE Heritage Lottery Fund have announced a grant of £404,500 to help the Walker Museum in Liverpool acquire an exquisite Weld Blundell Amber Cabinet, which was due for export.

One item for a fiver, another at five figures – the 1400-lot sale held by Keys (10% buyer’s premium) on February 20 was a classic of the old-fashioned, no- reasonable-consignment-refused kind at the Aylsham Salerooms in Norfolk. Most offerings over the two days sold at three figures but there were half a dozen or so lots which went over the £1000 mark and one which really aroused interest.

THE smaller items among the quality furniture, clock and collectable entries proved the most commercial lots at this 846-lot Herefordshire auction at Brightwells on 6 and 7 February.

THERE are no datelines at TEFAF Maastricht, which runs in the Dutch city until March 17, but Old Masters and top quality antiques are the stock that springs immediately to mind.

BETTER known for its polo club than its fine art, Cowdray Park in Midhurst, Sussex nevertheless provided Hampshire auctioneers Jacobs & Hunt with some talking points among a quantity of the “surplus to requirements” chattels the owners of the country pile had decided to get rid of.

THE auctioneers’ decision to place the first half of a sizeable consignment of furniture from a North Oxfordshire house in Mallams January sale paid dividends when the 87 lots provided half of the £130,000 total of the 277-lot sale.

PARIS: Ten works by Philippe Hiquily (born 1925) surfaced in the Camard sale at Drouot on February 8, comfortably exceeding predictions to post “record prices” and enjoy what Camard called “tremendous success among French and foreign collectors and decorators.”

THE policy of these Cheshire auctioneers, Maxwells, to hold a decent sale in January rather than in the crowded period before Christmas generally pays off, and did so this year although, that said, the local associations of the top seller would probably have resulted in a good price at any period.

Furniture was strong at this Cheshire sale at Patrick Cheyne on 26 January where the top seller was a set of eight (six and two carvers) and two near-matching George III style bleached walnut dining chairs.

While it is almost impossible to sell some routine furniture at present, Keys specialist Paul Goodley echoed the traditional view that attractively pitched guidelines are the key to success.

Christopher Gilbert: Selected Writings on Vernacular Furniture 1966-98, published by the Regional Furniture Society, price £20 plus postage and available from The Membership Secretary, The Regional Furniture Society, 12 Swan Street, Sible Hedingham, Essex, CO9 3HP. See also the society’s Website at www.regionalhistorysociety.com for details of back issues of the society’s journals.

Continental Church Furniture in England: A Traffic in Piety, by Charles Tracy, published by Antique Collectors’ Club. ISBN 185149376 £50 hb

THE antiques trade was hard hit last year and the Surrey auctioneers Ewbanks are finding that the current uncertain economic climate is stopping private vendors from consigning their property to sale.

Since the Craven commodes were sold in London last November there has not been any exceptional English furniture at auction in Britain, but that all changed when Dreweatt Neate offered the remnants of Daisy Fellowes’ Berkshire estate at Donnington Priory on January 30.

Good stock furniture dominated this 894-lot wide-ranging sale on 13 December at Heathcote Ball sourced from various private sources in Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

NOT the top seller at this 653-lot Suffolk sale at Abbotts on 19 December but interesting in that it sold at all, was a burr walnut Victorian davenport.

CONTINUING the tradition of the old Phillips network, the Sevenoaks branch of new owners Bonhams moved to Ramster, the Surrey stately home for a winter event offering some of the better pieces consigned to the company’s various rooms in the South East.

Villa Bombrini Sale: TWO days before their main mixed owner European furniture sale, Christie’s also offered a separate single owner auction – Furniture and Works of Art removed from Villa Bombrini, ‘Il Paradiso’, Genoa – on December 11. Just over 300 lots were offered, of which three quarters found buyers – selling to the tune of £1,134,280.

Tattered and blackened, possibly by fire, this pair of William IV Gillows mahogany library chairs had been consigned by a local restorer to Willingham Auctions, near Cambridge, for sale on December 29.

THIS was the second sale for the West Midlands firm Fieldings Auctioneers who got off to a tough start by holding their first sale in October when the market was reacting to the September 11 attacks.