Fairs and Markets

AS autumn approaches, dealers are marking their diaries for some familiar calls and a favourite entry for the Home Counties trade will be The Petersfield Antiques Fair at The Festival Hall of the Hampshire town from September 5 to 7.

ORGANISERS dmg Antiques Fairs have abandoned their Brunel Antiques & Collectors Fair, the next of which were scheduled for August 25 and December 27.

NOW in its fourth year The Original London Textiles,Vintage Fashion and Accessories Fair continues to make its mark attracting a different crowd to most fairs, many of them from the fashion industry.

NOT everyone sleeps it off on Boxing Day. Lancashire organisers Hoyle Promotions have been organising a Giant Boxing Day Fair at the Empress Ballroom at Blackpool Winter Gardens for more than 20 years and both public and trade attendance grows from year to year.

NORTH Yorkshire-based organisers Galloway Antiques Fairs continue a busy summer from August 29 to 31 with their fair at Naworth Castle, Brampton in Cumbria. Space limits this event to just 28 dealers but they obviously do business as a good many of them have been with Naworth since the first in 1996.

THERE will be plenty of antiques activity in central Paris this autumn, centred on two major fairs each with their quota of high- profile international dealers. A feast for fairgoers, but also behind the scenes a feast for those with a taste for intrigue since, as is so often the case with the Paris trade, there is plenty of politics involved. My Paris-based colleague Simon Hewitt takes a peek behind the arras and reports:

Although it was the clock section that provided the lion’s share of the money generated by Sotheby’s Olympia’s June 19 horological sale (largely thanks to their £800,000 Tompion), the bulk of the content was provided by wrist and pocket watches. Offered in a separate afternoon session, they accounted for 264 of the 395 lots.

FROM August 27 to 31 The Australian Antique Dealers Association hold their third annual AADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair at what the association’s president Charles Aronson assures me is Sydney’s hottest venue, Wharf 8 of the city’s Darling Harbour Passenger Terminal.

HIGH summer’s high spot for many collectors and dealers is the oldest of the three annual Antiques For Everyone fairs at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, the summer version of which will take place from July 31 to August 3.

THIS year’s New York Fall Fair has been cancelled but the owners, Florida-based International Fine Art Expositions, insist it will go ahead in October 2004. The New York Fall Fair was launched at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan last September and the second was scheduled for the same venue this year from October 14 to 20.

NEW York’s top fair, Brian and Anna Haughton’s International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show, is full with some 70 exhibitors and it is noticeable how many of the top dealers have gone for larger stands.

Galloway Antiques Fairs of Harrogate travel to the heart of the Home Counties for the weekend of July 25 to 27 for the Cranleigh School Antiques Fair. Galloway hold two fairs a year at the famous Surrey school, a 42-exhibitor event at Easter and this summer fixture which hosts around 35. Both are generally fully booked with a waiting list.

More than half of the world’s leading collectors are now based in the USA, according to a survey conducted by the New York-based magazine ARTnews. The 13th annual review of the world’s most active collectors of art and antiques – assembled through interviews with dealers, auctioneers, collectors, museum directors, curators, and consultants – found that 105 of the top 200 collectors are American with eight of the top ten spenders from the world’s superpower.

NORFOLK fair organiser Liz Allport-Lomax has been in business as Lomax Antiques Fairs for nigh on 12 years and in that time has made the East Anglian fairs scene her own, wisely concentrating all her efforts on the area she knows and not straying too far from her home turf.

THIS weekend from July 11 to 13 Essex organiser Robert Bailey returns to his top provincial venue, Tatton Park, near Knutsford for the 34th Cheshire Summer Antiques and Fine Art Fair.

Totalling £533,120, the Wingfield Digby collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain offered at Sotheby’s Olympia (20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 12 may not have been the highest grossing sale of the London Asian series but it fielded the fewest casualties and was full of the type of fresh-to-the-market provenanced material at low estimates which the trade crave.

NOW into its fourth year and an established favourite with very much its own following, The Original London Textiles, Vintage Fashion and Accessories Fair will be held this Sunday July 13 at Hammersmith Town Hall, King Street, London W6.

WITH more than 1000 dealers spread over 101/2 acres few would argue with the claim of Atlantique City to be the world’s largest indoor antiques and collectables show.

Rising early after a heavy night out and trawling through a muddy field with the local riff-raff may not sound like an ideal way to spend a Sunday morning. But, like thousands of Brits obsessed with car boot sales, the vendor of a William De Morgan charger in this sale had done just that to obtain his treasure.

A Rolls-Royce & Bentley sale held by Bonhams at Towcester Racecourse on June 21 included a number of sales brochures, catalogues, handbooks, manuals, etc. amongst the automobilia.