Thomson Roddick & Medcalf

A bound volume of early works on a famous automaton chess player, featured in ATG No 2387, was not the only lot in a recent Cumbrian sale to produce a handsome return.

Born in Celico, southern Italy and consequently known as ‘The Calabrian’, Gioachino Greco is considered the first professional chess player.

Among the best furniture lots in the regions so far this year was the small early 19th century centre table attributed to George Bullock (1777-1818) offered by Stride & Son (18% buyer’s premium) on March 8.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales under £2000, including a work by Scottish painter John Maxwell.

With vendors now well adjusted to realities of the market, the demand for standard Georgian furniture is unspectacular but steady.

Chinese material beyond the headlining world of porcelain continues to boost totals across the UK’s salerooms, occasionally eclipsing estimates.

Taxidermy, having emerged in a few years from a dusty, rather unseemly subject to a rostrum hot topic, continues to flourish across the country.

Two 1859 firsts of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species…, neither in what could be called good condition, made very strong prices in recent weeks. This is a book nowadays so desirable that such shortcomings can be overlooked.

Something of a rarity, To Iceland in a Yacht appears to have no other auction appearances to its name. It was privately printed in Edinburgh in 1873 for its author, the chemist Robert Angus Smith (1817-84), a man best known for his work on air pollution and his identification of what later came to be known as acid rain.

More Channel Islands silver to add to over 250 pieces dispersed as part of the Paint collection at Martel Maides earlier this year came to auction recently.

‘Stage Coach Passengers passing Woburn Sands’ is one of 100 coloured engraved caricatures after Isaac Cruikshank that illustrate GM Woodward’s Eccentric Excursions or Literary and Pictorial Sketches in England and South Wales, interspersed with Curious Anecdotes of 1807.

Owing to today’s minimalist taste, Continental views of 19th century ports are not an easy sell. This pair of canvases proved otherwise when they topped Thomson Roddick’s (15% buyer’s premium) March 18 sale in Carlisle, Cumbria.