Sotheby's

LIVEAUCTIONEERS.COM, the Manhattan-based company that provides real-time Internet bidding capability to many US auction houses, has signed an agreement with Sotheby’s New York branch to provide its services for selected Sotheby’s sales.

THE international Asian art community descended upon New York in March to secure the most enticing exhibits in Manhattan’s two major Asian art fairs and numerous dealers’ shows. They were also there to contest the best quality Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Southeast Asian fare in Sotheby’s and Christie’s five specialist auctions that took place between March 23 and 25.

The perennial and international popularity of the radially expanding dining table was underlined in South Africa when Stephan Welz & Co (in association with Sotheby’s) sold this William IV circular extending dining table by Johnstone, Jupe and Co for R950,000 (£84,820), plus 10 per cent premium, in Cape Town on March 30.

A CLUTCH of strong horological results for rare pieces by good makers or with technical innovations were seen in late March at Sotheby’s Bond Street (20/12% buyer’s premium).

ON Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs of April 28 the castaway was painter Jack Vettriano (b. 1954). When asked by presenter Sue Lawley how much he thought his celebrated oil, The Singing Butler, would sell for at Sotheby’s on April 19, Vettriano’s response was that it would exceed the top estimate of £200,000.

JEAN-BAPTISTE de Proyart, vice president of Sotheby’s France, is to leave the company this summer to work as an independent art advisor in books and manuscripts, based in Paris. He joined Sotheby’s in 1993 and, as head of books and manuscripts in France, organised several sales since the firm were allowed to sell in Paris in 2001.

The Death of Munrow, depicting the attack by a tiger on a certain Mr Munroe in 1793 when he was out on a hunting party on Saugar Island in West Bengal, is one of the most dramatic and celebrated subjects to be recorded in Staffordshire earthenware. As a result it usually commands a high price when it comes up for sale at auction but few could have predicted the $130,000 (£74,285) (plus buyer’s premium) realised for the example that appeared at Sotheby’s New York last week.

AFTER more than 10 years of research by a specially convened group of international scholars, Sotheby’s have revealed to the world’s press what they describe as a “newly-acknowledged” work by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75).

DATES have been announced for the first collectors’ sales to be held at Sotheby’s Olympia by the company’s former in-house specialists, now working independently.

Edward Tyson’s Orang-outang, sive homo sylvestris: Or, the anatomy of a pygmiecompared with that of a monkey, an ape, and a man... was the first work to demonstrate scientifically the structural relationships between man and anthropoid ape and one which had a powerful influence on subsequent thoughts on man’s place in nature – albeit the orang-outang on which his work was based was actually a young chimpanzee.

Illustrated in colour on the catalogue cover of Clevedon Salerooms’ March 4 sale was a watercolour described as being by Richard Parkes Bonington (1801-1828).

BOUND in red morocco gilt, an autograph draft manuscript of one of the more important letters that make up the narrative of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise – Lettre XXI, in which Saint-Preux writes about the women of Paris – was sold for €82,000 (£56,550) as part of the library of King Léopold III and Princess Lilian of Belgium at the Chateau d’Argenteuil near Waterloo. The sale was held by Sotheby’s Paris on December 11.

THE SPIRO collection, sold by Christie’s on December 3 included a few letters and documents of Spanish monarchs and a proclamation of July 1501, signed by both Ferdinand V and Isabella, that banned all unconverted Moors from Granada – the last step prior to the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain – was sold for £42,000.

LETTERS from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to members of his family are rarely seen on the market, but one lot in a Sotheby’s sale of December 9 presented no fewer that 40 letters and postcards addressed to his pianist brother Paul, among them some of the earlier known letters in his hand and, naturally enough, containing much on the subject of music. This lot found a buyer at £42,000.

SOTHEBY’S have just published their fourth quarter and year-end results for 2003, showing the company to be in a much better financial state than at the end of 2002.

SOLD at Sotheby’s (20% buyer’s premium) for £10,500 on December 9 was a copy in modern limp vellum of the Epigrammata of Joan Latinus, a work that praises John of Austria for his recent victory over the Turks at Lepanto.

Furniture activity in London has been fairly low-key so far this year, but two mid-February furniture sales not only looked a step above the rest but were also fairly similar in their scope. Christie’s South Kensington’s (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) 502-lot sale on February 11 was one of their five annual sales of more select, varied and decorative content.

The title page of Hugh Maccaghwell’s On the Sacrament of Penance which, printed at Louvain in 1618, is recognised as “the first original work by a living author in Irish”. The few works printed in Irish that preceded it were the Bible, liturgical texts or translations of the works of others, but this was one of five works produced in the years 1614-18 at a press operated by the Irish Franciscans at St. Anthony’s in Louvain – the first press to print and promote Irish writing in the vernacular.

Choosing to concentrate upon their auction business, Sotheby’s Holdings, Inc., have sold their real estate brokerage operations to Cendant Corporation. The total cash purchase price for the luxury brand and a 100-year licensing agreement was approximately $100m, plus ongoing fees based on future royalties from the development of a franchise business planned under the Sotheby's International Realty name.

An unprecedented crowd of over 500 people turned up to watch, if not bid, at Sotheby’s near sell-out Part I auction of contemporary art on February 5. A stream of telephone bids created numerous eye-catching results, including new auction highs for Nicolas de Staël (£1.15m), Richard Hamilton (£100,000), R.B. Kitaj (£220,000), Paul Pfeiffer (£40,000) and last year’s Turner Prizewinner Grayson Perry (b.1960).