Dealers

LONDON: OPENING in the heart of Greenwich this week is a familiar name in a new location, Walpoles, which is located at 18 Nelson Road, London SE10 9JB (Tel: 0208 305 3080).

WELSH period furniture dealer Ian Anderson of F.E. Anderson & Son has joined LAPADA’s board of directors. Mr Anderson’s business was started by his great-grandfather in 1842 and he still works from the original four-storey premises in the High Street of Welshpool, Powys. “We were one of the original members when LAPADA was set up,” said the new director, who joined the family firm upon leaving school in 1966.

LAST year was not a good year for Partridge Fine Art – in fact according to John Partridge, the firm, founded in 1905, suffered their worst set of results in his 46-year chairmanship. Now, however, a change in business direction is helping the Bond Street dealership – one of the capital’s most venerable and traditional – to turn their fortunes around.

Dealers on London’s Pimlico Road will learn shortly the results of their efforts to fight rent increases proposed by Grosvenor Estates. A meeting with landlords has been scheduled for June 9 with Grosvenor promising a “positive solution” to the issue. Presumably this will mean reversing earlier proposals to raise rents to £95 per square foot that came after rises from £43 to £65 imposed in December 2000.

WHILE in New York for the International Fine Art Fair, I dropped into Mallett’s new shop at 929 Madison Avenue. It could not have a better location and it is glamorous enough to have already made its mark in this select corner of Manhattan.

BEFORE we get steeped in the London June fairs, Essex organiser Robert Bailey revives his Petworth Antiques Fair at Seaford College in West Sussex from May 30 to June 1.

ANTIQUE dealers and interior designers are to the fore in the second annual Pimlico Road Garden Week which will be held from May 19 to 24 to coincide with the nearby Chelsea Flower Show.

THE stock market may be going down and tourists numbers dropping thanks to foreign conflict, but in Pimlico Road, antiques dealers are facing the biggest threat from their second huge rent hike in just over two years.

Mallett revealed a 47.6 per cent rise in turnover and a 20 per cent rise in pre-tax profits in 2002, described by chairman George Magan as “one of the most challenging years” in the history of the London dealership.

LONDON: PIMLICO, SW1 has long been a prime London area for antique hunting, but now it is gaining an increasingly high profile as an international centre for decorative work of all descriptions.

LATEST British dealers to cross the Atlantic in search of American sales are Bond Street’s Partridge Fine Arts who, until this Saturday, January 25, hold a selling exhibition at the New York premises of art dealers Dickinson Roundell.

A selection from one of the least known public collections in the country is going on exhibition in London for the first time. Eighty of the best pieces from the birthplace museum, Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, are being lent to the art dealers, Agnew’s in London.

COSTAS Kleanthous, pictured right, has been appointed a director of the board of LAPADA, the UK’s largest professional art and antique dealers’ association.

HOW can coins being sold on the rostrum in New York be sitting safely locked up in London and elsewhere at the same time? That is the conundrum facing the coins and medals world following the publication of a catalogue and results from a sale organised in New York by Riccardo Paolucci, a Yorkshire-based Italian dealer.

THE British Antique Dealers Association are advising members who qualify for compensation in the wake of the Sotheby’s/Christie’s price fixing case not to miss the claims deadline.

Antique dealers, interior designers or those with an eye to stylish decor in their own homes all need recourse to supplies of antique style furnishing fabrics whether it is to recover that Edwardian settee, recreate a 17th century tapestry-lined interior or give a period feel to those worn-out seats on a set of Regency chairs.

There is still plenty of time to catch the Christmas show at the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond St., who inform us that the exhibition in fact runs until December 21st and not the 11th as first reported in last month’s Decoration and Design.

Interior decorators may well be familiar with the work of ARC prints, the Battersea firm based at 1-6 Andrew Place, SW8.Their high quality reproductions of antique engravings of Piranesi vases, Roman architectural studies and David Roberts Middle Eastern landscapes can be seen on the walls of many an antique shop or stand as well as providing a stylish focal point to domestic interiors.

The claim against London art dealers Agnews over a painting formerly attributed to Constable has been settled out of court. Sir Simon Day launched the claim over a series of free valuations carried out on the painting – Hampstead Heath: Branch Hill Pond – from 1975 until the late 1990s.

LONDON: AXA Art Insurance, sponsors of Asian Art in London, have announced the winners of the two AXA Art Awards, one for two-dimensional and the other for three-dimensional works.