2014

ATG’s 10 Questions with Jason Clarke, Period furniture and antiques dealer, Newbury, Berkshire.

Estimated at just £200-300, a set of four early 20th century Chinese famille rose porcelain plaques depicting the four seasons in mountainous settings were bought by a phone bidder from Shanghai for £420,000 at Charterhouse of Sherborne in Dorset.

It turns out that a pair of three-foot pricket candlesticks, an advertising sign and a heavy convex mirror are not the easiest things to transport with only two hands on the London Underground at rush hour. In fact, the kindness of strangers becomes crucial.

The second Antiques Young Gun of the Year award ceremony will take place in July at a new venue: Alfies Antiques Market in London’s Marylebone, hosted by owner Bennie Gray.

The purchase of a George Bellows painting has signalled a major change in policy at the National Gallery, ending 190 years of showing only European artists.

A 53-year-old man has been charged following a break-in at Shapes auction house in the west of Edinburgh last year.

The trade have alerted ATG to the latest scam guide trying to con dealers into paying thousands of pounds for useless advertising.

The fundraising campaign to buy Van Dyck’s final self-portrait for the National Portrait Gallery will continue into the summer.

Six years ago, Ingrid Nilson of The Antiques Dealers Fair Limited held her first ‘Luxury Antiques Weekend’ in Northumberland, at Linden Hall Hotel Golf & Country Club near Morpeth.

This pencil drawing by John Constable inscribed ‘Binfiled Decr. 6th 1816’ is believed to have made when the artist was staying in Binfield in Berkshire whilst returning from his honeymoon in Dorset with his wife Maria.

The first stand-alone tribal art sale held by Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury was topped at £44,000 by this 19th or early 20th century Yombe seated figure from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Contemporary art sales in London last week raised a hammer total of £254.6m, a record for an auction series in this category in the capital.

Hong Kong’s Fine Art Asia fair organisers have announced that they will launch ‘Guardian Fine Art Asia’ (GFAA), the Beijing edition of the event, in May this year.

EXHIBITION – The young Ethiopian artist Ephrem Solomon (b.1983) first contacted Tiwani Contemporary in 2011, when the gallery was just opening in London’s Fitzrovia with the aim of promoting the work of contemporary artists from Africa and the diaspora.

Like those London buses where you wait forever then two come along at once, two versions of a rare Olympic torch limited to just 33 examples turned up in separate Drouot auctions in Paris within the space of just ten days.

To mark the 150th anniversary of Archibald Knox’s birth, the Olympia International Art & Antiques Fair will host a special exhibition celebrating the work of the Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts designer at this year’s fair.

A young clock conservator, Jonathon Kelly, is being given an opportunity to work on a rare 18th century musical and mechanical clock made by George Pyke.

On February 11 the Court of Aldermen formally admitted the Worshipful Company of Arts Scholars as the 110th Livery Company of the City of London.

Paris auction house Piasa will move this spring to a new location at 118 rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, the prestigious Right Bank shopping street, home to art and antiques galleries and to Sotheby’s Paris.

ATG’s 10 Questions with Sarah Seccombe of Blighty Antiques and Interiors, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.