Lyon & Turnbull

ONE might not have thought that a Glaswegian enamelled devotional triptych was the easiest of items to estimate, but Lyon & Turnbull (17.5/10% buyer's premium) specialist John Mackie had a number of reference points when cataloguing the piece shown right for the decorative arts sale in Edinburgh on April 21.

Right: this Morris & Co. tapestry titled Greenery sold for £180,000 (plus 17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) at Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull on April 21. The outstanding lot of the firm’s Decorative Arts sale was sold to a buyer from the London area, who said: “I fell in love with it the moment I saw it and just had to have it, it is a beautiful thing and worth every penny.”

Lyon & Turnbull’s 110-lot private collection did not just comprise Scottish silver, but also silver of Scottish interest. Among the more idiosyncratic elements in the catalogue was this allegorical Jacobite snuffbox, right.

The highlight of a 110-lot private collection of Scottish and Scottish-interest silver sold by Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull on February 19 was this tiny dram cup made by Hugh Ross c.1720.

One of the unforeseen consequences of the arrival of Enlightenment philosophy in Puritan Scotland was the creation of clubs and societies that encouraged exuberant and outrageous behaviour in their members. The best known is the Beggar’s Benison.

Despite a year that saw substantial declines in brown furniture prices and a tailing off in the demand for general silver, most of the UK’s top provincial auctioneers held steady in a difficult market.

Edinburgh-based auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull are set to expand out of Scotland, having made appointments in London, Devon and Newcastle. The bold move – claimed as a first for a Scottish auction house – comes close to the fifth birthday of an ambitious vision that has grown into a £5m business.

CLUBS: A ROCKY ride perhaps, but Lyon & Turnbull certainly had the best selection of clubs this year and the one real ace to give the market a fillip – a long-nose baffing spoon by George Daniel Brown of Blackheath and St Andrews, c.1850-60.

AS AT London auctioneers’ themed events, nationalist bidding also underpins demand at sales in Ireland and Scotland. The Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) report having “lots of private buyers and underbidders” at their May 23 Fine Paintings sale, despite the quantity of material being down on the equivalent sale last year owing to the gathering period conciding with the war in Iraq.

For a Scottish antique, no provenance is more guaranteed to stir the blood than a connection, however tenuous, with a romantic outlaw. At Lyon & Turnbull’s sale on 26 March the link was Rob Roy McGregor, or at least the cattle rustler’s loyal kinsman and Glasgow magistrate Baillie Nicol Jarvie.

One of the more mysterious objects at Lyon and Turnbull’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) decorative arts sale in Edinburgh on November 6 was this Art Nouveau pewter table lamp. Auctioneer John Mackie could not comment on why the futuristic design, measuring 2ft (60.5cm) high and apparantly unmarked, should have eclipsed a forecast of £300-500 and reached £6500.

Golf has always been a subject that can have a dramatic effect on the price levels of artists who normally make little impact in the salerooms. Take the case of Frank Watson Wood (1862-1953), a Berwick-on-Tweed watercolourist who specialised in landscapes and marines, the best examples of which fetch around £1500 at auction.

UK: Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull are expanding their business with the creation of three new jobs, two of them in silver and jewellery.“We are bucking the trend by continuing with our expansion plans as other auction rooms in Scotland reduce their workforce and close offices,” said vice-chairman Paul Roberts.

Nanking means to most people the rape of that city by the Japanese; to ceramics collectors it conjures up memories of the Nanking Cargo, but in the specialist picture market it is the place where the 1842 treaty was signed opening up five ports to British merchants “without (molestation or restraint”.

Collectors from Lancashire arrived at the Edinburgh sale of Decorative Arts held by Lyon and Turnbull (15/10% buyer’s premium) on November 7, excited by this silhouette, right, of their favourite ceramic factory.

While Lyon & Turnbull enjoyed the lion’s share of the audience for the two sales in Edinburgh at the end of June, Phillips (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) at least had the most surprising result in the form of this Tunbridgeware sewing/writing table by Fenner and Co., estimated at £300-500.

UK: ILLUSTRATED here is a plan of Aberdeen, one of 47 double-page engraved or litho plans (some folding) from a copy of John Wood’s Town Atlas of Scotland of 1818-26, rebound in modern boards, which sold for £2800 in the Lyon & Turnbull sale of February 17.

UK: THERE is a distinctly nervous look about the Dodo pictured here, as befits a creature staring extinction in the beak. This “Facsimile of [Roelandt] Savery’s picture of the Dodo in the Royal Gallery at Berlin” is a plate from H.E. Strickland & A.G. Melville’s The Dodo and its Kindred; or the History, Affinities and Osteology of the Dodo, Solitaire and other Extinct Birds of the islands Mauritius, Rodriguez and Bourbon.

UK: THE copy of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom offered by Lyon & Turnbull of Edinburgh on February 17 was one of the 170 or so signed, “complete” copies of the privately printed, subscribers’ edition of 1926 and in the original brown morocco binding, illustrated here.

In these days of raging prices for anything remotely decorative in the world of antiques, it is not often that you find something early, unusual and pleasing to the eye for little more than £500.