Auctions

This year’s FA Cup was seen as something of a turn-up with Portsmouth and Cardiff, two teams from outside the Premier League’s top four, reaching the final. But there was a time when the now-mighty Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal were nowhere to be seen in the competition.

This walnut table by the English architect-designer Edward William Godwin (1833-86), was spotted by Jeremy Lamond from Shrewsbury-based Halls during a routine valuation visit to a house in the Welshpool area.

This remarkable late 19th century English longcase clock offered for sale in Pennsylvania last month showed late Victorian design at its most confident.

THE gargantuan sums of money being spent at the top end of the contemporary art market continued unabated as the latest sales series in New York saw a staggering overall premium-inclusive total of $990m.

A HANDWRITTEN letter written by Albert Einstein in the year before he died giving his thoughts on religion drew spectacular bidding in London last week when it sold at £170,000 (plus premium) against an estimate of just £6000-8000.

Fears that New York’s flagship May sales might usher in a market meltdown were allayed last week as Sotheby’s and Christie’s posted solid results for Impressionist and Modern art.

Photo from 1866 rescued from the attic sells in Nottingham...

Two auctioneers, two Gérôme sculptures, but two very different estimates

After weeks of legal wrangling, permission has finally been granted to sell property from the bankrupt Manhattan Old Master dealership Salander-O'Reilly Gallery.

There was high drama at Christie's latest decorative arts sale in London, when half the £3.1m total came from this Glasgow school panel by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, which sold to an American collector for £1.5m (plus premium).

All eyes were on this 3ft 3in (99cm) high Roman marble double bust of Bacchus and his lover Ariadne at Bonhams Antiquities sale on May 1.

READERS who watched the recent BBC drama Miss Austen Regrets will recall the scene in which a startled, bemused but not overly enthusiastic Jane is told by the Prince Regent’s librarian that his royal master is a great admirer and that she should feel quite at liberty to dedicate any new novel to the Prince.

Two strong results for very different pieces were produced in Christie’s double bill of English furniture on April 24.

SOMEWHERE on a shelf in a pub in the Midlands there may be five rare books that could throw a whole new light on the Brontë family.

A BATTERED old Bible in a strongbox with a woodcut pasted on the inside of the lid was sold with a boxed rosary for £6200 by auctioneer Paul Beighton of Thurcroft, near Rotherham on March 9. Behind it there was quite a story.

Christie’s are confidently expecting to set a new auction record for British furniture in London on June 18 when they offer a small but exclusive auction of just a dozen lots under the title 12: Exceptional furniture.

A world record price for a comic-strip illustration was paid at a specalist sale at Artcurial in Paris on March 29: Georges Remi Hergé’s 1932 ink-and-gouache design for the cover of Tintin en Amérique.

London’s latest series of Islamic auctions, held from April 7-11, produced a series of record-breaking statistics. The result of the week came at Sotheby’s on April 9 when a 14 1/2in (37cm) long iron and copper key to the ka’ba, the holiest place in the Islamic world, sold for £8.2m, establishing a new auction high for any Islamic work of art.

NORTH Yorkshire saleroom Tennants, who have made a name selling the furniture of Robert Thompson, have secured an entire Mouseman commission for sale in July.

An image that may rewrite the history of photography has been withdrawn from a Sotheby’s New York sale pending further research.