Auctions

One of the first major dispersals of the autumn season in Paris will take place at Artcurial on September 17-18.

Christie’s is holding a five-day exhibition from September 13-17 in its Paris rooms of selected works from the collection of the famous architect IM Pei which are to be sold across various Impressionist and Modern and Contemporary and 20th century Chinese art auctions in Paris, New York and Hong Kong over the autumn season.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period August 22-28, 2019. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Many of the high prices achieved at last week’s ‘celebrity’ sale titled Bob Hawke & Blanche d’Alpuget: Mementos, Curiosities, Art and Design reflected the impact of souvenir hunters, anxious to own a reminder of Australia’s former prime minister who died earlier this year. But not all of them.

Purchased for £1 from a Hertfordshire charity shop earlier this year, a Qianlong famille rose wall vase will carry an estimate of over £50,000 at Sworders in the autumn.

Some of the rarest and most desirable of all English creamware jugs were those made for the American market. One of them, titled Signals at Portland Observatory, sold for $4400/£3600 (plus premium) at the Bourgeault-Horan auction in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

A first edition of the most famous work in angling literature will be offered at auction in North Yorkshire.

This copper-alloy Roman mask will be offered for sale on September 3 by TimeLine Auctions in London, estimated at £80,000-100,000.

Of the 24 silversmiths known to have worked in the Aberdeenshire town of Banff from the 17th century until the trade died out in the mid-1800s, William Scott the Elder is the first whose name is recorded.

The Tribal Art and Antiquities sale at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury on September 18-19 includes property from the estate of Ingrid McAlpine (1939-2018), one of London’s most prominent antiquities dealers.

The name Marklin always suggested an O gauge loco and tender offered at Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) would find a buyer against a £200-300 estimate but there was a considerably greater head of steam when international collectors looked closer.

This double-page engraved chart is from an early-17th century pilot book which is another of the highlights from the Mopelia Collection of atlases and travel books offered in London.

The term ‘duty dodgers’ is applied to pieces that were not sent for assay during the period 1720-58 when a steep tax was placed on silver. Silversmiths had a variety of methods of escaping this tax – including transposing marks from small articles to large or overstriking marks from older pieces.

In stark contrast to the elegant dolls’ houses which took the higher bids at a recent auction (ATG No 2403), a shillelagh was evidence of violence and tragedy in 19th century Ireland.

Among a number of finely bound works offered in a July 4, Cambridge sale were three family owned examples of the work of Captain Charles Elsden Gladstone (1855-1919), a retired Royal Navy officer.

Works by the Irish artist Paul Henry (1877-1958) appear frequently in Irish and UK salerooms but it is far more unusual for a painting by the Belfast-born painter – whose favoured subject matter was views of the west of Ireland – to emerge in Australia.