Print Edition

A single-owner collection, including significant works from the Modern British canon, sold for £541,200 at Sworders in Stansted Mountfitchet last week.

Estimated at just £150-200, a sardonyx cameo ring sold to a dealer for £39,000 (plus 20% buyer’s premium) at auction.

The European Parliament is to vote on a new law this week that would introduce extra red tape for dealers in antiques and antiquities operating within the European Union.

Henry Adams has achieved an auction record for Cedric Morris (1889-1982), completing a hat-trick of high prices for the artist-plantsman at the Chichester saleroom.

A selection of eight top items sold at regional salerooms who reported hammer totals for ATG's annual round-up of the auction market for 2018.

A legal claim lodged against Christie’s in New York has highlighted some of the practices relating to private sales that top-end auctioneers make behind closed doors.

A round-up of art and antiques news from the previous seven days, including Defra's notice regarding the movement of CITES-listed natural history items in the event of a No deal Brexit,

Topped by the 17th century Dutch bottles at £30,000 (see ATG No 2375), the year’s first sale at Hannam’s (23% buyer’s premium) had other treasures among the 2000 lots including the French bronze figural torchères, right.

If the Battle of Britain is your collecting field, then the sale of a Kent collection held in late 2018 would have been a major draw.

A work once said to have “…set the course for the modern world by its effective destruction of the anthropocentric view of the universe” made a rare auction appearance.

'Across the Continent. Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way' is a well-known hand coloured litho print issued by Currier & Ives, although the publisher’s imprint has been cut off the bottom of the example shown below.

The National Botanic Gardens of Wales spreads out into 500-plus acres at Llanarthne in the Carmarthenshire countryside and boasts a spectacular structure designed by Norman Foster: the largest single-span glasshouse in the world.

MADAM – You continue to receive letters from dealers complaining about buyer’s premiums.

The continued interest in Victorian music boxes in this age of Spotify and streaming was evident when three were among the 1500-lot sale held by Unique Auctions (17.5% buyer’s premium) to launch the new year.

With so many tribal art galleries concentrated in Brussels it is no surprise to find 10 specialists in the field showing at BRAFA, six of them from the Belgian capital.

Former courthouse in West Yorkshire opens as antiques centre and community hub.

The traditionally ‘dead’ period between Christmas and New Year was enlivened by the December 28 sale at Wotton Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) in Gloucestershire – to the extent that more than 20,000 people suffering withdrawal symptoms worldwide viewed it online and 1360 of them registered to bid.

Arctic and Antarctic exploration was the main theme of a library assembled over many years by architect Roger Casson (1943-2016).

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from January 22-February 1, 2019.

Another returning BRAFA exhibitor is the Paris dealer Xavier Eckhout, who specialises in animalier sculpture from 1880- 1950.