UK

UK: BLOOMSBURY Book Auctions, London has been sold to Stocklight Limited, owners of Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books and the Shapero Gallery.

UK: CHESTER antiques dealer Alan Shindler has been jailed for six months for handling and selling fake goods. And Trading Standards officers issued an alert to former trade customers in case they were duped.

UK: A SMALL group of scientific apparatus featured in Phillips’ July 18 horological auction in Bond Street, London and comprised a silver pocket chronometer by Webster and Son of London, hallmarked for 1834, and a 19th century five-inch theodolite signed for Reiss Leibenwerda, each with their custom-made cases.

An early 19th century blue transfer printed oval footed bowl, 11in (29cm) wide, depicting the death of Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805 which sold at The Bristol Auction Rooms on July 25.

LONDON: Bermondsey’s The Old Cinema antiques warehouse is to move out of the area after the building it occupies has been sold for redevelopment.

A House of Commons Committee has been appointed to examine the Kent County Council Bill in detail.

UK: THE current fashion for English porcelain may lean towards the earliest pieces of blue and white, but it was not the case 30 years ago when the vendor of this First Period Worcester yellow ground mask jug, c.1760 purchased this piece for £3800 at the Grosvenor House Antiques Fair.

THE best bottle ever dug? This was the question that auctioneer Alan Blakeman of BBR was asking himself after an extraordinary price was tendered by an American collector at the Elsecar salerooms on July 9 for this early shaft and globe example.

OLYMPIA have made dateline changes at their flagship antiques event in London, the June Fine Art and Antiques Fair, and they will apply to both the gallery and the ground floor.

THE golfers who tee-off at St Andrew’s on Thursday might stand a better chance of winning the Open if they forced Tiger Woods to play with this locally made ball, rather than the standard ultra-scientific balata.

UK: PAUL Henry’s A Village in Connemara which sold for £58,000 at Edgar Horns in Eastbourne on July 12. The 16 x 24in (41 x 61cm) oil on canvas is fully signed and still bears an original paper label on the stretcher with title and artist, though the frame is a replacement.

UK: JOHN Russell of Falkirk was a barometer maker to the Prince Regent and, as a result, this mahogany wheel-shaped example with the Prince of Wales feathers commanded considerable interest from leading London dealers at Woolley and Wallis’s Salisbury salerooms on July 4.

THE second week of London’s prestige midsummer sales saw the Modern given way to the traditional with a flurry of exceptional prices for Old Master paintings and drawings and Renaissance works of art.

TO some a relatively run-of-the-mill hot water jug and cover, but to others the inspiration for possibly the most important prose fiction in Britain’s rich literary history.

THOUGH it might no longer be the place where an international vendor would choose to sell a £20m Picasso or Van Gogh, London last week enhanced its reputation as a revenue for selling major-name Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art with a string of major results at Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales.

UK: THE Internet has failed to generate any significant volume of sales for London’s art dealers in the past year, reports the members’ survey for 1999/2000 by the Society of London Art Dealers.

UK: CYPHERS can be frustrating things, whether one is using the word to denote a code for secret writing or, as is more often the case in the antiques world, some ingenious arrangement of conjoined initials.

UK: LEADING the auction at £100,000 (plus premium) was this 27in (68.5cm) high early 18th century, two-section Saxon covered goblet from Dresden which is applied with 12 silver-gilt oval medallions of Roman emperors and was discovered in a cellar at Schloss Hinnenburg, in northern Germany.

THE Booker, the Baftas, the Brits, and now the Baca; the inaugural British Antiques and Collectables Awards finally joined the ranks of other UK arts prize-giving bashes with applause and aplomb at Grosvenor House on June 20.

UK: WHAT difference does provenance actually make to the price of an antique? The answer is apparently none at all in the case of the shortest lived and least productive factory in the history of English porcelain.