News topics

COMMISSIONED in 1908 by the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Co., Mists of Yellowstone, one of many pictures of what is now the Yellowstone National Park region painted by Thomas Moran, nearly doubled the previous saleroom best for the artist on July 29. It made $4.4m (£2.42m) in the grand ballroom of the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino in Reno, Nevada – where Coeur d’Alene Art hold an annual auction, the big event of the year for well-heeled lovers of Western art.

RIGHT: he had initially catalogued it as by Archibald Knox, but it was not until Buckinghamshire auctioneer John Dickins removed its cover shortly before the sale that he realised what a rarity he was really offering in this 19in (48cm) high Arts and Crafts mantel clock.

PICTURED right is one of Nicolaas Johannes Roosenboom’s (1805-1880) classic winter landscapes, The Pleasure Trip: Elegant figures on Ice, which made €9000 (£6000) at Christie’s Amsterdam (23.205/11.9% buyer’s premium) Pictures Watercolours and Drawings sale on September 1. The signed oil on panel was 23in x 2ft 4in (58 x72cm).

SOTHEBY'S (20/12% buyer’s premium) September 14 sale offered a selection of watches and wristwatches in their Bond Street sale that realised a total of £424,500 with selling rates of 67 per cent by lot and value.

SOLD for £2200 (C.R. Johnson) at Bloomsbury Auctions on August 19 was a Batchelor’s Directory.., a work. of 1694, which goes on to describe itself as ...a treatise on the excellence of marriage; of its necessity, and the means to live happy in it: together with an apology for the women against the calumnies of the men. Bound in contemporary red morocco gilt, this first edition was catalogued as “a dedication copy from the author”, but to whom, we are not told.

AN Americana sale held by Eldreds of East Dennis on August 5-6 included a number of works by Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr. (1910-82), a Cape Cod artist for whom mermaids and sailors, lighthouses and balloons were key themes, and the picture top right, a late addition to the catalogue, proved one of the Massachusetts sale’s greater successes, at $40,000 (£22,000).

FIRST edition copies of John Martyn’s translations of Virgil’s Georgicks (1741) and Bucolicks (1749), both illustrated with coloured plates and maps and bound in contemporary calf, made £500 in a September 17 sale held by John Bellman of Billingshurst.

SOMETHING I overlooked when compiling my principal natural history round-ups of the summer was a copy of ‘Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary’ – or at least that was how it was described in a 10 word entry in the catalogue of a May 21-23 sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

AN August 21-22 sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, included not only the panoramic view of Hong Kong seen top right, but a dozen or so other views of the Hongs at Canton, Hong Kong itself and other European trading settlements in China.

AT a time when many dealers are scaling down and reducing costs, Burford sporting antiques specialist, Manfred Schotten, is opening his new trade warehouse to coincide with his Old Sport. Here's Sport Indeed exhibition as part of the CADA autumn selling exhibition which runs from October 9-23.

NATIONAL media coverage has ensured that most people will have heard about the copy of Dandy No.1, complete with Express Whistler that set a British comic auction record of £18,500 in the Comic Book Postal Auctions sale that ended on September 7.

BILLED as the top gun on the catalogue cover of the September 1 sales at Lewes arms and armour specialists Wallis & Wallis (15% buyer's premium), this c.1649 German or Dutch 34-bore wheel lock pistol lived up to its reputation.

IN rebacked old panelled calf, a 1584 first edition of Welsh historian David Powell’s “corrected, augmented and continued” version of the Historie of Cambria, now called Wales left in manuscript form by Hugh Lhuyd, was sold for £1350 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

IN Antiques Trade Gazette No.1655, I illustrated a first octavo edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, 1840-44, that sold for $48,000 (£25,920) in a May sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In their August 21-22 sale they had another, half morocco bound and rather better looking set – one originally sold by Clarendon Harris, a book dealer of Worcester, Mass – which made $64,000 (£35,200).

AN escaped slave who became a prominent social reformer, journalist and public official, Frederick Douglass (1817-95) published a first account of his life in 1845, but revised and extended versions followed in 1855 and, finally in 1881 as The Life and Times...

RELATIVES of one of Italy’s leading 20th century glass designers have launched an assault on the trade in works using his name.

“IN my 30 years in the business I’ve not seen anything like this before,” said Neil Freeman, of Angling Auctions. “I’ve checked everywhere, but I can’t find anything like it.”

BOUND in full calf, a 1579-80 edition of John Kitchin’s The Authoritie of al Justices of Peace... was sold for £700 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

IT was a third edition of 1799, slightly foxed and browned and lacking the half titles, but the copy of George Walker’s novel The Vagabond seen in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of August 19 was in a contemporary calf gilt binding and it sold at £400 (C.R. Johnson).

IT’S been billed as the most important discovery in British numismatics for many years. Now the London auction house Spink are to offer the first newly-discovered Anglo-Saxon gold penny to come to light for almost a century.