Auctions

A militaria section at Lawrences’ (15% buyer's premium) October 28-19 sale featured a quality, privately entered, 12-lot cache of weapons which suffered not one casualty and racked up a £30,000 total.

THE wrappers are torn and creased, the spine has been repaired with glue and several plates and text leaves are loose, but the book seen right is an 1858 first edition of perhaps the scarcest of all American fishing books, Fishing with Hook and Line... by ‘Frank Forester’, the pseudonym used by that prolific chronicler of hunting, shooting and fishing, Henry William Herbert.

OVER 2000 lots in the field of 20th Century Decorative Arts were offered for sale in Paris in late November and early December. The most lucrative Art Deco sale, at Christie’s on December 1, ran to 107 lots (93 sold) and yielded a hammer total of €2.04m (£1.43m), with a top price of €340,000 (£238,000) for a lacquered screen by Eileen Gray (c.1915). A 1927 lacquered coffee table by Gaston Suisse, with eggshell and oxidised silver decoration, tripled estimate on €55,000 (£38,500).

AS recently as a decade ago, the Pennsylvanian Impressionists or New Hope School – perhaps the most recognisable group of painters to emerge from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) – remained a relatively untapped seam for ‘serious’ auctioneers of the Mid-Atlantic States.

KNOWN as Twelve Months of Flowers, a famous set of plates engraved by Henry Fletcher after original floral paintings by Pieter Casteels was originally produced as a sumptuously illustrated nursery catalogue of some 400 different species of flowers.

Executed in the 1890s, when Beatrix Potter was working for the greetings card firm Hildesheimer, this little ink and watercolour drawing was last seen at auction in London about ten year ago, but on December 1 it came back to Christie’s South Kensington and sold for £25,000.

A Christie’s South Kensington sports sale of November 23 saw a bid of £5500 on a programme for the 1897 F.A. Cup Final at Crystal Palace in which Aston Villa completed a League and Cup double by beating Everton 3-2.

THE US is not the only North American country notching up record totals for auctions of its own domestically-produced art. On November 25 at Toronto’s Park Hyatt Hotel, just a week before Sotheby’s achieved the first ever nine-figure total for a sale of American art, the Vancouver-based auctioneers Heffel Fine Art (15% buyer’s premium) held the highest-ever grossing sale of Fine Canadian Art.

Christie’s King Street (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) were pulling out all the stops for their first full week of the month.

Halls (15% buyer’s premium) "It was quite a rare object, in good working order and sang beautifully.”

SOLD at £42,000 to a collector in a November 30 sale of Continental books and manuscripts held by Sotheby’s was a 1566 Lyon edition of Celsus’ De re medica from the library of France’s ‘Prince of Poets’, Pierre de Ronsard. Autograph material by de Ronsard is of the utmost rarity, with just two documents entirely in his hand recorded (both in the Bibliothèque Nationale) and ony two or three volumes bearing his signature, as this one does, remaining in private hands.

FIRST printed by Berthelet in 1531, Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Govenor, a treatise on the education of statesmen that was dedicated to Henry VIII and found great favour at court, has been described as “not only the earliest treatise on moral philosophy in English but the first of an imposing array which introduced into England the cultural and political ideals of the renaissance”.

MINDFUL of how demand at many sales is polarised between the ‘best and the rest’, Sotheby’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) decided to tackle this prevalent attitude head on with a new type of sale.

Thos. Wm. Gaze & Son (10% buyer’s premium)At 13in (33cm) high this really is a very good-sized example of William Moorcroft’s celebrated Hazeldene design.

Is there a Christmas factor in the auction rooms? Cheffins auctioneer Jonathan Law (Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent) believes that the season may have some effect in putting a little pressure on people to buy rather than wait.

ANOTHER Greek author whom Aldus published was Aristotle, whose Opera Omnia appeared in a five-part, seven-volume edition between 1495 and 1498.

Autographs, manuscripts and printed ephemera have long been a great strength of sales at Strides of Chichester, but the December 3 sale was rather special, being devoted entirely to that field and, though not billed as such, the first part of the personal collection of Derek White, who for many years has catalogued for the Sussex saleroom.

Richard Winterton (15% buyer’s premium)Trained by Tom Coulthwaite, who schooled a number of high-class jumpers in the first decades of the 20th century, Irish-bred Eremon was one of the top chasers of his era. And 1907 was very much his year.

Complete with its original bill of sale and warranty, this fine 18ct gold chronograph minute repeater pocket watch made by London maker J.W. Benson sold into the trade for £3100 at John Taylor’s (12% buyer’s premium) of Louth on December 7.

“Business has been good, but to achieve this I have had to work extremely hard.” This is how Chris Beetles summed up 2004 and, having already taken over £500,000 in sales from his renowned annual exhibition of British illustrators, he is ending the year on a bullish note.