Art and antiques news from 2002

Finelot chairman John Bly reassured investors last week that the on-line dealership, which made a loss of £1.44m last year, should make a profit by 2004.

FRANCE: Just weeks after Sotheby’s and Christie’s first sales in Paris, the Hôtel Drouot is the target of two takeover bids, from Barclays Private Equity, an investment fund, and Pierre Bergé, longtime president of the Yves St-Laurent fashion house and a former chairman of the Paris Opera.

LONDON: Three dealers exhibiting at the Spring Fine Art and Antiques Fair at Olympia in West London will hold a concurrent joint exhibition just two minutes’ walk away from the West London exhibition complex, with the object of pulling in the public and any decorators who are in town.

In October 1987, Christie’s embarked on a series of six sales to dispose of the Doheny library, a spectacular series of auctions that ended in May 1989 and raised a grand total of $38m – a sum that remains to this day a record for any library sold at auction.

ONE of only 50 copies of Proceedings of a General Court Martial.... for the Trial of Major General Arnold that came up for sale in a Swanns Americana sale of November 29 was ex-library, bound in later half morocco with assorted stamps and various defects, but this Philadelphia imprint of 1780 is an extremely rare and historically significant item and attracted a lot of interest.

A new world record was set at Spink’s sale of Medals, Orders and Decorations (ODM) on December 10. The group of medals won by Air Vice-Marshal (as he became) “Johnnie” Johnson were sold for £241,500 (including premium).

The third sale in Christie's South Kensington’s December toy triumvirate was their teddy bear and soft toy sale held on the 3rd of the month. The second of their biannual sales in this category, this was a sizeable offering at 319 lots and was well attended by a mix of collectors and dealers.

ED GILBERT, a Californian book dealer, became a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs when he read The Gods of Mars in 1925, aged just 12 years. Shortly thereafter he was introduced to ERB by his elder sister, Florence, who in 1935 became the writer’s wife.

The decorative approach to antique buying has been given a firm nod of acknowledgment by Christie’s. In New York next month they launch the first of a new category of “one-stop shopping” sales, where they will be offering property from a wide range of collecting fields with an equally broad price range aimed at “lifestyle clients looking for the perfect object to decorate their homes”.

FOR a long time now, Kent antique prints dealer Ingrid Nilson, who is a member of and director of LAPADA, has been a well-known figure in the antiques trade, but in recent years her highly decorative stock has been sought after by interior designers.

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.

NEXT week the British fair, which some 17 years ago was the first to cater seriously for the home and, more importantly, the transatlantic decorative trade, opens in its marquee at Battersea Park.

PARIS: American buyers were to the forefront at the ArtCurial-Briest sales on December 17 and 18, held in the stylish Hôtel Dassault halfway down the Champs-Elysées, and preceded by an elegantly hung four-day viewing.

The Tower of Babel was a popular subject with Flemish artists, and with the Louvain-born Lucas van Valkenborch (c.1530-97) in particular. He painted at least four versions, to be found in Munich, Mainz, the Louvre, and in the Beaussant-Lefèvre saleroom at Drouot on December 14, when an oil on panel Tower dated 1587, 28 x 35in (71 x 90cm), spiralled six times over estimate to Fr8.2m (£781,000), establishing an auction record for the artist.

PARIS: An ensemble of nine photographs by Gustave Le Gray, all albumen paper prints from collodion or paper negatives from the collection of chemist Paul-Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran (who discovered the metal gallium), surfaced at Millon & Associés on December 3.

Just the thing to lift the spirits in the cold, dark, stock-deprived days of winter, this spectacular whorl of a tropical centre table received a warm reception at the Salisbury salerooms of Woolley and Wallis on January 8.

Bonhams are to sell the impressive collection of Minton ceramics from the Minton Museum, Stoke-on-Trent in their New Bond Street rooms this year. The collection will be dispersed in two instalments, with the first 400-lot dispersal scheduled for April 30.

SWITZERLAND: The Salon de Mars scheduled for April 6 to 14 at Palexpo, Geneva has been cancelled since it clashes with the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie at the same venue.

BOUND to be a highlight at TEFAF Maastricht in March is Rembrandt’s painting of the goddess Minerva which will be offered by New York dealer Otto Naumann for $40m.

Blackamoor, Taunymoor, Suck a Bubby; Your Father’s a Cuckold, Your Mother told me ....not the most familiar of nursery rhymes, nor indeed one likely to find much favour in the present century, but that rhyme, illustrated right, is only one of 37 found in the second volume of Tom Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, many of which are much more familiar, if not always in quite the same form as we know them now.