Auctions

The well-known Worcestershire firm Andrew Grant are expected to close their fine art auction department.

Charles Hanson, formerly of Wintertons, launches his own auction business next month.

At first glance there’s nothing very exciting at all about this Prattware pot lid.

Lincolnshire auctioneers Golding Young established a new house record on August 10 when they sold this superb mahogany breakfront side cabinet right for £135,000 (plus 15 per cent buyer’s premium).

A DECADE after the Thurn und Taxis and Baden Baden sales in the 1990s, Sotheby’s are once again decamping to a German castle to stage another mammoth aristocratic auction.

The latest round of golf sales held up in Scotland threw up a now-familiar pattern of mixed results.

THE unexpected success of the pair of library chairs discussed above led the way at the Wisborough Green saleroom, but there was keen action, mainly in the three-figure range, across the three days when 1800 lots were offered.

Long before J.R.R. Tolkien settled down to write The Hobbit, he had acquired a postcard reproduction of the ink, watercolour and gouache painting Der Berggeist (The Mountain Spirit).

TWO lots stood out among the 600 lots offered at Hampshire. One was an 18th century matched pair of brass barrelled flintlock pistols signed Burnford, London, which, because of a missing ramrod and broken trigger mechanism were catalogued a/f but sold to a collector at a quadruple estimate £1600.

Longcases sell well after prices hit plateauTHE 530 lots offered at Dreweatt Neate’s Bristol rooms in June covered most areas of the antiques trade with the exception of ceramics, but the sale was always going to be dominated by the strong 44-lot clocks section.

Two very good stick barometers, in the popular 1820s form with bowfront and ebony-inlaid mahogany cases, were among the highlights at Grantham.

To collectors of the so-called castle-top card cases, subject matter is everything. Pictured here is a great rarity.

Two pieces of Yuan dynasty blue and white porcelain smashed coveted auction records in the UK salerooms last week.

Few will be unaware that 2005 is the bicentenary of Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar, given the number of celebrations and exhibitions commemorating the event.

DOUBTLESS unique, but in its way typical of the sort of success enjoyed at Robert Finan’s sale, was this Russian 18th century emerald, ruby and diamond cross, right, mounted in silver and gold.

LIKE so much material where the name is so much part of the game, the exquisite objets d’art fashioned in the Russian workshops of Carl Fabergé have attracted copyists, repro-producers and outright forgers.

As celebrations abound for the most famous of all seamen, another great British admiral was being remembered in spectacular fashion at the Nottingham auction rooms of Mellors & Kirk on June 16. The subject of a fierce engagement between collectors was the so-called Rodney Jug.

IT was just three weeks into the First World War when British destroyers engaged the enemy off the Heligoland Bight near Denmark.

London turned up the heat in the market for Contemporary art when both Sotheby’s and Christie’s achieved outstanding results at their June evening sales.

The July sales of Asian art will be notable for bringing two newly discovered pieces to the market, one in London and the other in Salisbury.