International

A US federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of former Sotheby’s chairman A. Alfred Taubman who had been found guilty of conspiring with rival auctioneer Christie’s International to fix commission fees.

The Free Society of Traders in Pennsilvania (sic) was chartered in England by William Penn as proprietor of the Province of Pennsylvania, in March 1682, a few months before his departure to America.

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s small 1832 child portrait of the future Kaiser Franz Joseph as a Small Grenadier playing with toy soldiers, right, panel 13 x 11in (33.5 x 28cm), led the Wiener Kunst sale in Vienna on June 11 with a low-estimate €150,000 (£97,000).

TOULON-based, but owned by Britain’s dmg, the Societé Française d’organisation have acquired the Cagnes-sur-Mer Antiques Fair which will be held next in the famous Hippodrome of the town in South-West France from September 12 to 16.

USA: THREE pieces of Tiffany art glass and a Tiffany-type lamp from the Handel factory – sold by Doyles of New York on June 5 and by Skinners of Boston on June 22 – are featured here.

USA: The works of two American impressionists, Fern Isabel Coppedge (1888-1951) and Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927), both of whom were plein air painters whose works were admired for their fresh and colourful imagery, are featured here, together with a sample of the folksier treatment of rural America by Paul Seifert, a German fruit and vegetable farmer who took to painting as a lucrative sideline.

USA: Next week in an extraordinary single-lot auction – and the first joint sale between Sotheby’s.com and eBay, this 1933 Double Eagle $20 gold coin is to be offered for sale by Sotheby’s and New York coin auctioneer Stack’s on behalf of the US government.

USA: A stage designer for the Ballets Russes, advertising artist, painter and book illustrator, Alexander Alexeieff, is probably best known for his animated cartoons, but in two posters that he designed for LNER he produced surreal images that were unlike anything previously seen on a train poster.

Sales by members of the Paris Compagnie des Commissaires-Priseurs (i.e. all Paris auctioneers bar Christie’s and Sotheby’s) fell 15 per cent in the first half of 2002 to €290m (£187m), as compared to the first six months of 2001.

After 236 years of auctioning wine in London and other international centres, Christie’s will be holding their inaugural sale of fine wines in Paris on September 14.

USA: California-based show organisers Caskey-Lees will manage the first annual show for the Art and Antique Dealers League of America at the Gramercy Park Armory, New York on November 22-24.

ITALY: VENICE-based auction house Semenzato is to be merged into Finarte of Milan in early August with a view to taking on Sotheby’s and Christie’s head on in Italy.

FRANCE: A stud farm will be the unusual yet appropriate venue for for an auction of all things equines in Orne, Normandy on July 21.

USA: ONE OF America’s best known antique and collectors’ fairs, the Atlantique City show in New Jersey, will soon be under new ownership following the sale of Krause Publications, specialist collecting and hobby publishers based in Iola, Wisconsin to F &W Publications of Cincinnati.

SALES IN PARIS – THE LAFOND COLLECTION: A RAREFIED array of pharmacy jars formed the basis of the former Louis Lafond Collection presented at Briest on June 4. Lafond (1880-1950) was a practising chemist whose unremarkable personal history epitomises that of the dedicated, middle-class, often anonymous buying public that continues to flourish in France and, especially, at the Hôtel Drouot.

Every picture tells a story, but in the case of Théodore Chassériau’s large portrait of Comtesse de Latour-Maubourg, it was condition as much as content that revealed the artist’s state of mind at the time.

PIMLICO dealer Alexander von Moltke has formed a partnership with the Manhattan interior designers Robert Marinelli and Michael Reeves who operate as RMMR.

USA: ENJOY a scary new exhibition running at Posteritati Movie Posters until September 8 at their galleries at 241 Centre Street, New York City, between SoHo and Little Italy.

Frost & Reed, one of London’s oldest art dealerships, is to open a New York branch in mid-October, citing increasing taxes and bureaucracy imposed by the European Union as part of their reason for the move.

GERMANY: Round about the year 286AD times were very interesting in Britannia. Some small documents of this small and little known facet of British history appeared in the Lanz (15% buyer’s premium) sale in Munich on May 27.