Auctioneers

An unusual picture, both in terms of its style and quality, was the star of the show at this year’s Fine Paintings sale held by the Scottish auctioneers John Swan (10% buyer’s premium) at Dryburgh Abbey Hotel near St Boswells on December 2.

A prayerbook presented by Louis XV to Maria Leczinska as a wedding present in 1725 sold at Sotheby’s (23.92/14.35% buyer’s premium) for €280,000 (£200,000) on December 2, during an otherwise disappointing 194-lot royal provenance sale that brought €1.26m (£900,000) and was 72 per cent sold by value, but just 56 per cent by lot.

The Orient played a significant part in Tennants’ (Buyers premium 15%) success in the Yorkshire Dales.

WHEN the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in Madrid in 1605, it proved an immediate success, but as the original publisher, Francisco de Robles, had failed to register copyright outside his native Castile, others were quick to jump on the Cervantes bandwagon.

IN CONTRAST to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, who usually offer Japanese arms and armour in Japanese works of art sales, Bonhams (19.5/10% buyers premium) include theirs as a section in militaria auctions.

ANDREW McIntosh Patrick, director of The Fine Art Society, is to sell his celebrated collection of metalwork by the Victorian industrial designer Christopher Dresser. Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull will conduct the projected £400,000 sale on April 19.

There is a mistake in the Sotheby's Furniture and Interior Decorator sale advertisement in the 8th January issue of the Antiques Trade Gazette (No. 1671). The sale and view is being held at Olympia and not New Bond Street as stated.

PRINTED ephemera, often disregarded detritus, is not generally highly valued material. But should it chance to survive, it can acquire socio-historical and even monetary value.

A December 7 sale of incunabula conducted by Christie’s South Kensington saw a collector’s bid of £10,000 on a first edition of Johannes Nider’s Consolatorium..., a discussion of conscience that is based in large part on the teachings of St. Augustine, Gregory the Great and other medieval writers.

A more academic ivory carving than anything at Kidson-Trigg’s sale was this unsigned but fine quality 6 3/4in (17.5cm) portrait bust, right, offered at the Banbury rooms of Holloways (15% buyer’s premium) on November 30.

Wotton Auction Rooms Wotton-under-Edge October 19-20 Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent THIS wide-ranging, 1600-lot Gloucestershire sale was helped by a large number of probate estates which furnished proceedings with the type of reasonably estimated material sought after by dealers and collectors alike.

OVER half of ArtCurial’s sale on December 8 was devoted to the Paris Design firm XO, founded in 1985.

HIGHLIGHT of the 1440-lot Asian section of Nagel’s (33% buyer’s premium) mammoth November sale series was this rare 11in (28cm) high cylindrical cloisonné enamel vase of c.1900 by the highly regarded Namikawa Yasuyuki decorated with a striking design of bamboo and a snail on a black ground.

The continuing strength of the privately-fuelled market for unusual or quality toys in good condition saw Wallis & Wallis of Lewes boast healthy selling rates by volume in their specialist November and October toy sales.

ON November 12 Christie’s (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) sold a European private collection of Pre-Columbian works of art amassed between the late 1960s and 1980. The market responded enthusiastically to fresh material of high quality with distinguished provenances. Although the lottage rate was only 73 per cent, by value, the sale came in at 93 per cent, a premium-inclusive total of $3.23m (£1.75m).

“In 20 years I have never seen anything quite like it,” says auctioneer Richard Bromell of Sherborne’s Charterhouse. “It has a central dial for Greenwich which is surrounded by 11 smaller dials telling the time in the various countries. Having originally been presented to a Victorian relative [of the vendors] who built railways for a living, he would have been able to keep track of time with all his business interests.”

A militaria section at Lawrences’ (15% buyer's premium) October 28-19 sale featured a quality, privately entered, 12-lot cache of weapons which suffered not one casualty and racked up a £30,000 total.

THE wrappers are torn and creased, the spine has been repaired with glue and several plates and text leaves are loose, but the book seen right is an 1858 first edition of perhaps the scarcest of all American fishing books, Fishing with Hook and Line... by ‘Frank Forester’, the pseudonym used by that prolific chronicler of hunting, shooting and fishing, Henry William Herbert.

KNOWN as Twelve Months of Flowers, a famous set of plates engraved by Henry Fletcher after original floral paintings by Pieter Casteels was originally produced as a sumptuously illustrated nursery catalogue of some 400 different species of flowers.

Executed in the 1890s, when Beatrix Potter was working for the greetings card firm Hildesheimer, this little ink and watercolour drawing was last seen at auction in London about ten year ago, but on December 1 it came back to Christie’s South Kensington and sold for £25,000.