International

A high spot of the Sotheby’s sale of December 12 was a group of Jane Austen firsts in the original boards. Illustrated above right is the former Lady Shelley/Earl Spencer/Jerome Kern copy of her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility of 1811, the blue boards with cream paper spines, which made $70,000 (£49,295).

DENMARK: Given the continuing vogue for Scandinavian interiors, it comes as no surprise that the first modern art and design auction to be held by Danish auctioneers Bruun Rasmussen (25% buyer’s premium including VAT) in Århus last month on February 12, met with very favourable results.

WILLIAM Wood’s New Englands Prospect..., first published in London in 1634, was intended to “enrich the knowledge of the mind-travelling Reader, or benefit the future Voyager”.

NOTED St. James’s Asian specialists Rossi and Rossi leave their Jermyn Street showrooms for New York this month for an exciting show which runs until March 26 at the galleries of Dickinson Roundell, 19 East 66th Street.

US auction house Dargate will be put up for auction on March 30 without reserve. The decision follows the failure of the first attempt on September 7 last year, when the starting bid for the fixed assets, ongoing business, goodwill, Website, mailing list and other holdings was set at $500,000.

Mallet, one of London’s most famous and venerable antiques dealerships, are opening prestigious new permanent galleries on New York’s Upper East Side.

Phillips-Selkirk, the St Louis, Missouri auction house owned by Phillips de Pury Luxembourg, has a new name and a new owner.

THERE are no datelines at TEFAF Maastricht, which runs in the Dutch city until March 17, but Old Masters and top quality antiques are the stock that springs immediately to mind.

Christie’s (20.93/11.96% buyer’s premium) staged their first Automobile sale in Paris on February 12 at the Rétromobile vintage car show, which attracts 100,000 visitors every year.

NEW YORK: MARINE paintings are a specialist area which have received plenty of attention from auction houses eager to tap into the wealth of those rich enough to enjoy mucking around in boats.

A £70,000 REWARD is being offered after five paintings worth more than £1.7m were stolen from an antiques fair in Sweden.

VICTORIA Borwick, until last autumn director of the Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fairs, has joined Florida-based IFAE (International Fine Art Expositions) as a fair director.

HOLLAND: IN honour of the Netherlands’ long tradition of landscapes and town scenes Christie’s Amsterdam (buyer’s premium 20.825 per cent) had a topographical theme to its pictures sale on January 22.

BELGIUM: Antwerp’s four main auction-houses have announced plans to co-ordinate their sales and viewings for the first time.

FAIRS are among the most contentious, gossip-ridden and difficult-to-read aspects of the whole antiques business. But while organisers’ rivalry can often verge on the psychotic, there is one thing they all agree about, and that is the status of The European Fine Art Fair at Maastricht.

PARIS: The whole history of French coins from Gaulish times to the present was covered by the Jean Vinchon (10.764% buyer’s premium) sale in Paris on November 6. Because it was a single collection rather than the random assemblage that chance had brought across the counter there were many choice examples on offer.

USA: Wedgwood wares formed a significant slice of Skinner’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) 890-lot auction of English and Continental furniture and decorations on January 19. Of the 230-odd lots of ceramics that featured in the sale, two-thirds comprised works from that factory.

A large desert Caravane by Victor Huguet (c.1895), 4ft 4in x 6ft 8in (1.31 x 2.02m) and inspired by Fromentin, led the Delorme-Fraysse picture sale on February 12 with €82,000 (£51,200).

FRANCE: Auction turnover in France, for sales by commissaires-priseurs, rose 4.4 per cent in 2001 to €1.9bn (£1.17bn). There were significant regional increases in Lyon & the South-East (up 14 per cent to £180m, with Lyon itself contributing over one-third of that figure) and Brittany-Anjou (up 17 per cent to £102m), whereas Normandy suffered a dip of 19 per cent with sales of £86m.

In the second major Internet shill bidding case, three people have been charged with running a scheme that boosted the sale prices of hundreds of pieces of Lalique glass auctioned on eBay.