Art and antiques news from 2007

In celebration of Fellows & Sons’ 130th anniversary, students and practising goldsmiths were invited by the Birmingham-based auctioneers to submit a design for a piece of utilitarian silver.

THE UK’s top dealer associations have struck a deal with retailer John Lewis leading to the launch of an extensive online art and antiques directory aimed at shoppers.

This summer the annual staff-exhibition at Sotheby’s is entitled No Limits and includes 40 paintings, photographs, pieces of sculpture and jewellery by members of Sotheby’s staff.

MARKS, one of London’s best-known silver dealerships, are to refocus their operations, moving out of costly showrooms in Mayfair’s Mount Street.

EDWIN Dyson of Blind Lemon Events, who organises vintage fashion fairs across the UK, recently advertised in ATG seeking deco dealers for a garden party on Sunday, July 29.

FOR the third time this year, a dealers’ survey has highlighted the unpopularity of the Artist’s Resale Right in the trade and the indifference of a majority artists to the ruling.

Auctioneers are not just there for the bad things in life. It was in 2006 that Salisbury firm Woolley & Wallis were contacted by Sheffield silversmith C.J. Vander, a company in administration with stock to liquidate.

FREQUENTLY, the most interesting object in someone’s garage is not the car.

One of the quirkier and more unusual offerings to feature in Christie’s £3.7m sale of English furniture and works of art on June 7 was this rare Elizabethan map fragment, one of the first tapestries ever produced in England.

In the 1950s, a farmer in Ingatestone, Essex found a tiny silver tag measuring just 3/4in (1.8cm) long on his farm. Shaped like a shield with a ring, one side was engraved LORD RICH above a stylised bird and the other featured a family crest.

FIRST a dealer and now an organiser - Phil Savory, a Northamptonshire-based dealer in ceramics and treen who exhibits at fairs in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Essex, has decided to start his own fairs venture, PJ Fairs.

THIS year's Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair, held from June 14 to 20, was thought by many to have the highest quality stock seen at the event for some time.

Bonhams are to take advantage of Sotheby’s decision to end Japanese sales by recruiting their top specialist and consultant.

THIRTY-six stallholders from Portobello Road made their way to Madrid at the end of June where the London street market was recreated for a day in the Spanish capital.

Salisbury auctioneers Woolley & Wallis are to sell the collection of early English, Scottish and Irish silver belonging to the well-known London dealership How.

Christie's lose showpiece sale as Prince Charles steps in to help seal £45m deal

France’s share of the global auction market fell by 5.8 per cent in 2006, warns the Conseil des Ventes, the national auction watchdog, in its annual report published on June 25. Worldwide auction activity, it says, rose 34 per cent over the same period.

It’s doubtful that the average person associates car boot sales with burlesque dancers, but that’s the combination you’ll find at the Art Car Boot Fair 2007 in London’s Brick Lane.

Demand for contemporary art reached yet another new level of intensity in London’s auction rooms last week when Christie’s and Sotheby’s both posted record totals of nearly £75m for their June evening sales of contemporary works.

In 1914, Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) was living in Cornwall and enjoying the most fertile period of her career.