Auctioneers

SOTHEBY’S are celebrating setting the top price achieved for an object at auction on the Internet with the $7.4m paid on June 29 for a first printing copy of the American Declaration of Independence.

UK: JOHN Russell of Falkirk was a barometer maker to the Prince Regent and, as a result, this mahogany wheel-shaped example with the Prince of Wales feathers commanded considerable interest from leading London dealers at Woolley and Wallis’s Salisbury salerooms on July 4.

THE second week of London’s prestige midsummer sales saw the Modern given way to the traditional with a flurry of exceptional prices for Old Master paintings and drawings and Renaissance works of art.

TO some a relatively run-of-the-mill hot water jug and cover, but to others the inspiration for possibly the most important prose fiction in Britain’s rich literary history.

FRANCE’S auction reform has been definitively adopted by parliament after its final reading in the Senate on June 27.

Gavelnet.com, the San Francisco-based Internet auction specialists, have merged with Tangible Asset Galleries, Inc a California-based retailer, wholesaler and auctioneer of fine art who last year declared sales of over $20 million.

THOUGH it might no longer be the place where an international vendor would choose to sell a £20m Picasso or Van Gogh, London last week enhanced its reputation as a revenue for selling major-name Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art with a string of major results at Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales.

UK: LEADING the auction at £100,000 (plus premium) was this 27in (68.5cm) high early 18th century, two-section Saxon covered goblet from Dresden which is applied with 12 silver-gilt oval medallions of Roman emperors and was discovered in a cellar at Schloss Hinnenburg, in northern Germany.

SOTHEBY’S Holdings have announced their nominees for the firm’s board of directors, with shareholders due to vote on them at the delayed Annual Meeting in New York on August 3.

UK: Hawk-eyed Neil Froggatt spotted the true worth of an antique treasure during a routine household evaluation.

UK: WHAT difference does provenance actually make to the price of an antique? The answer is apparently none at all in the case of the shortest lived and least productive factory in the history of English porcelain.

UK: ONE of a set of twelve 16th century Limoges enamelled plates, which were offered for sale by the Manchester auctioneers Capes Dunn during a special sale on May 25 conducted from the Assembly Rooms in Lytham to promote their regional office on the Fyld coast.

UK: THE PHENOMENAL success enjoyed in the English speaking world by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter... books has been expensively reflected in the antiquarian, or rather secondhand book world, where (even in the high priced modern firsts market) the prices being asked for Harry the First are almost unbelievable.

UK: OVER half the images in the Craven collection of photographs offered by Bearne’s in Exeter on May 6 were by William, 2nd Earl of Craven.

UK: THE romance, expertise and astonishing prices at the Benacre sale came together when this pair of candelabra, above, were put up by Sotheby’s.

UK: THIS rare and unusual George II carved giltwood console table in the manner of William Kent modelled with an owl and probably carved by John Bonson of Savile Row sold for £520,000 (plus premium) – some ten times its estimate.

UK: JAMES Boswell’s question and Dr Samuel Johnson’s answer on the subject of China, c.1778.

US: A concerted push into the market by Phillips meant that there were three major players on the Impressionst and Modern auction scene in New York last week.

UK: THE first week of May saw a rash of specialist photograph, auctions break out in England but the cream of the crop was a single-owner sale of vintage photographs collected by William, 2nd Earl of Craven (1809-1866), at Bearne’s in Exeter on May 6.

UK: BONHAMS have announced that they will close their coin and medal department following their July 18 sale, whose main feature is a collection of minor Roman and Byzantine coins.