Fairs and Markets

IT will be some months before many deals are clinched and further money changes hands, but with some exceptions I think the 61 top dealers at the tenth International Fine Art Fair in New York from May 9 to 14 found their stay in Manhattan profitable.

VETERAN organiser Donald Bayliss, who operates out of Ludlow as Continuity Fairs, reports a stunning response to his first International Antiques and Collectors Fair of Wales, which was launched at the Royal Welsh Showground at Builth Wells over the Bank Holiday weekend of May 3 and 4.

JUNE looms and the annual antiques season is due to get underway. Fairs are at the hub of proceedings and while Grosvenor House initiated this summer celebration of collecting and connoisseurship back in the 1930s, the latest addition to the June roster, artLONDON, has made its mark in a remarkably short time.

AS announced earlier this year, Beckenham’s own Brian Simons and Philip Thompson, who trade as DECOFAIRS, relaunch their London Art Deco Fair at the Chelsea Village Hotel, London SW6, on Sunday June 8.

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.

TWO longstanding antique centres, one of them among Britain’s oldest, have bad news: one is to close and the other may have to, as well, if the new owner wants to develop the site for something else.

OUR flagship fair and one of the world’s most prestigious antiques events, the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair remains as traditional as strawberries and cream at Wimbledon and Pimms at Henley, but no one can say the most venerable of antiques events has failed to move with fashion.

BIRTHDAY greetings to the Carmarthen Antiques and Collectors Fair, for a decade Wales’ top antiques show.

MAGRITTE'S Oiseau du Ciel, pictured right, commissioned by Belgium’s Sabena airline in 1965, was sold at auction in Brussels on May 5 for a triple-estimate €3.4m (£2.3m).

AFTER more than two decades, the January LAPADA fair at Birmingham’s NEC has come to an end.

NOT a fair that has in recent years maintained a very high profile but nevertheless the annual Buxton Antiques Fair has been running for nearly 40 years and is a lot better quality fixture than many better publicised ones.

MORE than 200 dealers, mainly from New England, will gather at the Concert Field of Waterloo village, Stanhope, New Jersey over the weekend of May 17 and 18 for the state’s largest and oldest outdoor fair.

RARELY do organisers get together for a joint venture but David Smith of EW Services and Nick Cox of Abbey Art Deco Fairs did just that for the first Southampton Art Deco Fair, held at Southampton university on Sunday April 27.

ALTHOUGH the London Original Print Fair has finished its four-day run on April 27, there remain a number of enticing events for print aficionados.

AFTER 15 years in the glass business, Cheshire organiser Patricia Hier knows her field well and it shows at her twice-yearly National Glass Collectors Fair, the next of which will be held at the National Motorcycle Museum, West Midlands on Sunday May 11.

Getting Sotheby’s Olympia’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) 288-lot April 2 sale of British and European Ceramics off to a brisk start was a well received section devoted to early Italian maiolica, Dutch Delft and other tin-glazed earthenwares.

Wimbledon-based Paola Francia-Gardiner, who operates as P&A Antiques, holds two fairs in one this weekend at the Chelsea Village Hotel in London’s Fulham Road when on Sunday April 27 the Art Deco & 20th Century Design Fair runs in tandem with the Fashion for Passion Fair.

ALMOST all the exhibitors at the giant Antiques For Everyone fair, held at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre from April 3 to 6, arrived with far from high hopes. This was just as well for a good many of them, but not for all.

FOUNDED in 1990 by Devonshire-based Madeline Marchand, who operates as Fair Antiques, the next twice-yearly East Berkshire Antiques Fair will be held at the Berkshire College of Agriculture, near Maidenhead, over the Bank Holiday weekend of May 3 to 5.

MURMURS around the trade indicate that business at fairs is easier out of London than in the capital, which bodes well for one of our top provincial events, The Harrogate Antique and Fine Art Fair held from May 1 to 5 at the Harrogate International Centre, bang in the centre of town.