UK

A rare Joseph Wright of Derby mezzotint valued at £9500 was stolen from prints and maps dealer Sanders of Oxford on June 3. At around 4.00pm two white men entered the shop. Both were in their late 40s, one 5ft 7in high of stocky build with short, dark grey hair, the other slightly taller with balding, brown, short hair.

Christie’s are to relocate their education arm from King Street to new premises in the Fitzrovia area of London. The current building, number 5 King Street that was the former Spink premises, will undergo refurbishment in the summer. While the upper floors are expected to remain Christie’s offices, a decision will be made in the near future as to the use of the prime retail space below.

Apparently consigned for sale by a local lady who had no idea of its commercial potential – it had been acquired as holiday reading when she was a young girl – a 1937 first edition of The Hobbit was sold at £10,300 in a general antiques sale held by Fieldings in Hagley, Worcester-shire, on April 26.

THE Fine Art Auction Group, who have been building a network of salerooms in the South East and South West over the past two years, have acquired Bristol Auction Rooms.

Dealers on London’s Pimlico Road will learn shortly the results of their efforts to fight rent increases proposed by Grosvenor Estates. A meeting with landlords has been scheduled for June 9 with Grosvenor promising a “positive solution” to the issue. Presumably this will mean reversing earlier proposals to raise rents to £95 per square foot that came after rises from £43 to £65 imposed in December 2000.

One of several items consigned to Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury by descendants of the 7th and 9th Dukes of Newcastle for sale on May 13, this Regency mahogany centre table with profusely carved trestle supports in the manner of Thomas Hope surprised auctioneer and vendor alike when it breezed past its £800-1200 estimate to sell for £57,000 (plus 15/10 per cent buyer’s premium).

JUNE is very much the traditional month for London’s high season in the art market. However, in the middle of May we had a taster of the frenzied auction activity usually associated with that month, a mini tsunami of high-flying sales with a clutch of dramatic and record-breaking prices.

It seems that in terms of arriving in numbers after none has been seen for ages, novelty lighthouse cocktail shakers are to Yorkshire what No. 9 buses are to central London. In Antiques Trade Gazette No.1589 dated May 17 we illustrated just such a silver-plated shaker which took £1250 at Andrew Hartley’s Ilkley, West Yorkshire sale on April 9-10.

“Mr Woilde, we ’ave come for tew take yew Where felons and criminals dwell: We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly For this is the Cadogan Hotel.” These lines by John Betjeman form part of a poem that marks one of the most notorious incidents in late Victorian society – The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel.

It was a poignant irony that the contents of the North Hampshire vineyard that had so impressed Her Majesty should come up for auction in the same month that another offering of Château Mouton-Rothschild was making a less than favourable impression with the British establishment.

OLYMPIA’s Fine Art and Antiques Fair has plenty to interest the decorators but they are guaranteed something eye-catching at the stand of Notting Hill dealers Jay Arenski and Peter Petrou, who have made the unusual and decorative their forte. In recent years the pair caused a stir with a bejewelled mummy case (complete with incumbent) and sold out their stand full of Black Forest furniture, which now graces ski lodges from Aspen to Gstaad.

Many Antiques Trade Gazette readers will be familiar with the name Francis Raeymaekers of ADC Heritage from his days as a dealer in antique silver. After a sojourn in New York, he is back in London with a new venture.

The Fulham end of the Kings Road in London is already a mecca for decorators with incumbents like Guinevere, Mora & Upham and Fergus Cochrane. They have now been joined by Bazaar Trading Co. at 568 King’s Road, SW6 who say they are offering something rather different.

SELDOM do niche fairs catch on so quickly as the splendid Hali Antique Carpet and Textile Art Fair, the sixth of which which will be held in its new location of Level One of Olympia 2 from June 5 to 8.

Clearly Tony Blair would be best advised to take round a bottle of Wooldings ’94, rather than Mouton ’89 the next time he pops over to the Palace for dinner. As has been widely reported in the media, the Prime Minister recently received half a case of Château Mouton-Rothschild’s 1989 vintage as a 50th birthday present from President Jacques Chirac.

THE provincial scene is nothing if not surprising. The Guildford Auction Rooms received a call from a firm of London solicitors earlier this year to sell a large cardboard box of jewellery from the estate of Marian Wenzel an academic who taught the history of jewellery design.

HOPEFULLY with a host of international collectors and dealers in town for the fairs, there is business to be achieved back at the London shops, and a number of them will be mounting special selling exhibitions during June.

SHOWHOUSES in new housing developments are often a depressing, formulaic affair but this is not the case at the best designed showhouse in town at 20 Aubrey Square, a new residential development of 20 town houses at Campden Hill, Kensington, London W8.

AFTER three years at the Gateway Arcade in Upper Street, Islington, Modernist dealers David Tatham and Chris Reen have moved into a shop at 25 Camden Passage, N1 where they trade as Origin Modernism.

This portrait in oils depicts Willie Park Senior of Musselburgh who won the very first Open Championship held at Prestwick Golf Club in 1860. Painted by an unidentified hand c.1860, when Park first leapt to fame (he won the championship again in 1863, 1866 and 1875), it is believed to be the only known contemporary portrait of a 19th century Open golf champion.