Auctions

“No one can rival Thomas Cole for engraving in the 19th century,” said director Jamie South after this exhibition-quality carriage clock sold for £26,000 (plus 20% premium) at Gardiner Houlgate in Horsham, Bath, on October 25. It went to an American buyer towards the top end of the estimate.

Earlier works in an October 18 sale held by Cheffins (22.5% buyer’s premium) included a scarce 1688 first of Randle Holme’s The Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon, an heraldic work by the third member of a distinguished Chester family of heraldic painters and genealogists to bear that name. It made £1200.

A Nobel prize-winner’s gold medal awarded to a British scientist is to go under the hammer in Hollywood as part of Julien’s Auctions sale on November 17.

As auction houses expand their specialist sales programmes, separate departments can also develop if the volume of business is worth it. Not many have a dedicated single-owner department, however.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period November 2-8, 2017. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

A mid-19th century scrimshaw carved whalebone walking cane sold for a house record of £17,000 (plus 18% buyer’s premium) at East Bristol Auctions on November 9.

Fitzroy Square to the north of central London was a key location in early 20th century British art. Virginia Woolf lived here for several years, a few doors down from Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler also had a studio.

Forum Auctions has expanded its modern and contemporary prints and editions department with two new appointments.

It’s a new name and a new start for a Jedburgh saleroom this autumn.

This archetypal still-life by Cecil Kennedy (1905-97) topped Halls’ (20% buyer’s premium) £300,000 auction on October 18.

A brief letter of 1864 in which Ulysses S Grant agrees to General William T Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’, a bold plan to destroy Atlanta, then march across Georgia to Savannah or Charleston during the American Civil War, sold for $100,000 (£75,755) on October 19, at Heritage Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in Dallas.

A collection of tobacco leaf pattern Chinese export porcelain surpassed all expectations to sell for a combined £116,000 at Mallams Cheltenham (20% buyer’s premium).