Keys

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales below £900, including a David Bates view of the Wye.

Norfolk auction house Keys has marked the end of its 65th year in business by gaining independence from its estate agency parent company.

Two under-catalogued Sino-Tibetan bronzes illuminated the regional saleroom scene with multi-estimate sums in the final days of November.

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.

One of the harder titles in the New Naturalist series to find today is RJ Berry’s Natural History of Orkney.

Some 240 lots in a recent two-day book sale in Norfolk came from the library of local authors and collectors David and Patricia Cory, with science fiction, fantasy, ghost stories and crime fiction very much in evidence.

Three modestly valued works at regional sales.

In the early 1920s, the artist Dora Carrington (1893-1932) began creating a series of foil glass paintings.

Three more modestly valued works drawing attention at regional sales

More than 100 paintings owned by the Royal Society of Marine Artists were dispersed in a Norfolk auction.

Michael Rothenstein’s illustration of Lennie Small and George Millon, the Californian migrant workers whose story is told in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, formed both the jacket illustration and the frontispiece (shown below) to the 1927, first UK edition.

More than 100 paintings owned by the Royal Society of Marine Artists are to be sold at auction in Norfolk.

Lucie Rowe, who started her career with Cirencester auction house Moore Allen & Innocent 15 years ago as a part-time saleday porter, has been promoted to her first management position: assistant saleroom manager.

Pictures, prints and taxidermic displays accounted for the larger part of the Ornithology Sale held by Keys (17.5% buyer’s premium) on September 22, but it also offered some 175 book lots, many of them multiples.

Keys is holding two specialist sales next year to whet the appetite. Not only does the Norfolk auction house have a shipshape selection dedicated to ‘local hero’ Nelson, but it has also secured the diploma collection of the Royal Society of Marine Artists (RSMA), Tom Derbyshire writes.

It was a busy summer for Keys (20% buyer’s premium), who had book sales in both July and August.

Sold for £420 in an August 24-25 sale held by Keys (17.5% buyer’s premium) was a 1939 first of Maurice Gorham’s 'The Local', with its 15 coloured litho illustrations by Edward Ardizzone.