Auctioneers

Jean Théodore Descourtilz’s Oiseaux brillans du Brésil “…is so rare that I had begun to doubt its existence”.

Heritage Auctions in Texas sold this Broadwood amboyna and giltwood grand piano for $22,000 (plus 25% buyer’s premium) at a recent auction. Evidently it had been on quite a journey.

Pittsburgh entrepreneur Joseph Calihan and his wife Brenda bought their first piece of Irish art – an oil by Paul Henry – in the early 1990s.

Three modestly valued works in regional sales, all sold below £1000 including a watercolour of a North African market scene by Hercules Brabazon Brabazon.

Founder remembered as anniversary sale sheds light on evolution of the Narnia Chronicles

Proof of a burgeoning market, a series of stellar results for British studio pottery were posted at the ‘Made in Britain’ sale conducted by Sotheby’s on Bond Street.

Containing an original watercolour, one of just a dozen de luxe copies of the 1931, Harrap edition of Izaak Walton’s 'Compleat Angler', illustrated by Arthur Rackham, made a record equalling £10,000 at Gildings (18/12% buyer’s premium) of Market Harborough.

One of the earliest surviving incandescent light bulbs, made by the English physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) in the 1870s, sold for £7500 (plus 25% buyer’s premium) at Bonhams’ sale titled Instruments of Science and Technology.

What still feels to many like the opening month of a new season got off to an excellent start with some serious, if occasionally unexpected, five-figure bids at four major provincial salerooms.

This linocut comes from one of just 30 copies of Rigby Graham’s 'The Casquets… the most dangerous Channel Islands' issued by the Brewhouse Press in 1972.

Figurative art was the other big seller in early September, led by the waxwork of Medardo Rosso’s sculpture Bambina Ridente (see last week’s News pages) which topped a successful week of sales at Chiswick Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) when it more than doubled the top estimate at £180,000.