Clars Auction Gallery

An update on news from across the auction houses.

The Khalili Collections revealed it was the buyer of the ‘lost’ monumental Meiji cloisonné vase that surfaced for sale in California last month.

For over a century, a monumental 8ft (2.44m) high Meiji cloisonné vase provided the focal point to one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s oldest restaurants.

Estimated to sell for $800-1200, this loving cup combining the talents of William Moorcroft and the San Francisco jewellers Shreve & Co. sold for $27,000 (£17,650) at Clars Auction Gallery in Oakland, California.

THE two Tiffany works of art that gave strong performances within days of each other in recent US sales were not the usual lamps, glassware or table silver.

AT OVER 1000 lots, the May 22 sale held by Greenslade Taylor Hunt of Taunton was certainly one of the bigger sales of that week, but only a single lot topped the £1000 mark – a disbound, incomplete and defective English Bible. Apparently a 1540 reissue in smaller format of the Great Bible that Thomas Cromwell ordered to be placed in the country’s churches so that “parishioners may moste commodiously resorte to the same”, it was bid up to £1250.