Auctions

Christie’s spring decorative arts sale will take place on May 22. It features works by some of the current hot favourites in this field, notably the Lalannes and Rembrandt Bugatti.

Quinn’s Auction Galleries is selling a collection of around 1000 pieces of Wedgwood assembled by Adele Barnett, the founder and past president of Washington DC’s Wedgwood Society, and her husband Alan. The collection is to be offered in its Falls Church saleroom on April 14.

The sort of large-scale, widely varied provincial auction which had Cheffins auctioneer Luke Macdonald enthusing “it was like selling used to be 15 years ago” after his March 7-8 sale at Cambridge (ATG No 2335) is rarer than it used to be, but plainly alive and well and prospering.

Two William and Mary side tables, one period and the other catalogued as ‘style’, bringing different results in March.

A remarkable Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes collection which was consigned to auction by their daughter, Frieda Hughes, ran to some 100 lots and formed a separately catalogued part of a recent Knightsbridge sale.

Antiques Trade Gazette can confirm that Chiswick Auctions has proof of good title for a rare group of maps and charts, which the auction house sold last month.

The work of the MacMahon photographic studio of Aberdeen, this extraordinary carbon print was made in 1908 and depicts ‘Giant Cod Specimens…’ bought and cured by A&M Smith, a local fish processing and curing business.

A gloriously Welsh view of a jagged, grey slate quarry by JMW Turner (1775-1851) took top honours at Cardiff saleroom Rogers Jones (20% buyer’s premium).

One of just 100 copies of a scarce, privately published edition of poems called Salvo for Russia, produced in 1942 in aid of the ‘Comforts Fund for Women and Children of Russia’, was offered in a recent West Country sale.

Provenance played a key role in the performance of a small group of pictures formerly owned by one of Australia’s biggest artists, Sidney Nolan (1917-92).

Early recipe books can make for absorbing and, to modern readers, occasionally comic or puzzling reading, as demonstrated in three examples from recent sales.

Used to dramatic effect on the cover of the catalogue for a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale, shown below is one of a collection of around 125 monochrome watercolour drawings of Irish lighthouses and the Irish coastline produced c.1860-67.

When Frances Noble, head of Dix Noonan Webb’s jewellery department, was shown this coronet with a family tradition connecting it to the Duke of Wellington, it was caked with dirt.

The central 350-lot section of the auction of clocks, watches and scientific instruments to be held by Skinner in Marlborough on April 20 comprises a single-owner collection of European tools.

A panel front from a cassone will feature in the April 24 sale of Old Master paintings to be held by Dorotheum in Vienna.

A Dutch auction house is planning to launch regular sales in London as, it says, the art and antiques market in Holland has contracted.