News topics

WHAT do the Society of Women Artists (SWA), founded in 1855, and Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers (RMS), founded in 1896, have in common?

WITH selling rates that rarely dip below 80 per cent and steadily increasing totals that are the envy of more traditional departments, auctions of Contemporary art continue to go from strength to strength.

THOMAS Rowlandson’s (1756-1827) watercolour Place des Victoires, Paris (estimated £60,000-80,000) failed to find a buyer when offered at Sotheby’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 1.

ON June 4, as part of the Fortunoff library, Bloomsbury Auctions sold a 1936 first of John Maynard Keynes’ enormously infleunetial General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money for £1700 (Bauman).

IN its latest published results, Partridge have recorded a significant fall in both turnover and profits citing again the very difficult trading conditions.

THE most desirable of the varied wares produced by the small ceramics factory established by Vilmos Zsolnay (1828-1900) in the southwest Hungarian town of Pecs are those created after the 1890s. It was then that Zsolnay – having encountered the glazes of Clement Massier in Paris – perfected his Eosine glaze and employed his principle designer Tade Sikorski to model forms sympathetic to the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements.

WITH its prevalence of antiques shops and auctioneers, one might imagine a degree of difficulty in locating a member of Cotswolds society untouched by the world of antiques.

IT is not often that an antiques dealer ends up on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, but until September 19 that is just what is happening.

SHEER decorative exuberance helped this Roman mosaic panel, c.2nd century AD, right, sell to an American private collector for $260,000 (£141,305), almost triple the upper estimate at Sotheby’s New York (20/12% buyer's premium) sale of June 9.

AT Scarborough Perry Fine Arts' (15% buyer's premium) June 24-25 sale, auctioneer Stephen Perry, who had given a distressed Regency painted settee sofa a modest pre-sale estimate of £400, admitted ruefully after seeing it go for ten times that amount: “I can value furniture in general but I find it difficult to value interior decorator’s pieces.”

REGULAR sales of toys, dolls and bears are among the specialist categories pinpointed for expansion by Brightwells (15% buyer’s premium) of Leominster.

IN the same week that Sotheby’s and Christie’s were offering their summer selections of English furniture, Bonhams’ Bond Street (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) offered a 224-lot English and Continental mix that also incorporated a sizeable selection of works of art. The broader mix didn’t result in a higher take-up: selling rates for this July 29 event were 54 per cent by lot and 65 in money on a £640,440 total.

LEOMINSTER auctioneer Brightwells will offer the lifetime collection of recorded sound enthusiast Don Watson, in a single vendor sale on July 29.

DAVID Teniers the Younger’s whimsical 6 x 8 1/2in (16 x 22cm), oil on copper view of Monkeys Playing Cards, sold to a private buyer against the London trade for a double-estimate €220,000 (£146,665) at Tajan on June 24.

THE forerunners of their kind may have been a relatively humble form of seating, but, as two lots in the recent English furniture sales showed, it wasn’t long before the Windsor chair began to branch out.

DECORATIVE, functional and large – the undisputed highlight of Andrew Grant's (15% buyer's premium) 525-lot May 13 sale was a gilt-framed hall mirror catalogued as in the manner of William Kent.

THE Paris firm of Bourgey was founded in Paris in 1895. Now under the direction of the granddaughter of the founder, Sabine Bourgey, it is still going strong if the recent sale on June 3 is anything to go by.

SAIREY Gamp and Tony Weller are two of the most commonly encountered Royal Doulton character jugs (and accordingly among the cheapest) but only very rarely are the two Dickens’ characters seen as bookends.

PROBABLY the best-known and the most coveted of the novelty table lighters made by the Ronson Lighter Co. is the 1936 patent Touch-Tip Bartender.

THE railways themselves may not be as dependable as they were, but you can absolutely count on Sheffield Railwayana Auctions coming up with the goods. June 12 saw the specialists, who still don’t charge buyer’s premium, steaming along to a £438,000 total from 530 lots.