London

AT their Council meeting last week the British Antique Dealers Association decided on no further action regarding complaints by some members that well-known Kent dealer and fellow member Lennox Cato was fitted with a microphone while carrying out vetting duties at last month's Olympia International Art & Antiques Fair.

LONDON’S latest contemporary art sales saw vast sums of money continuing to be channelled into top-end post-War art as prices and confidence in the market remained high.

HOTSPUR and Jeremy, two of London’s long-established top antiques dealerships, are to cease trading later this year and hold a joint sale of their stock at Christie’s.

A NUMBER of dealers are having to leave The Van Arcade in Portobello Road after the owners issued a two-month notice to quit.

If Bonhams' July 2 sale of 20th century British art is anything to go by, demand for the humorous art of Beryl Cook (1926-2008) has strengthened since she died in May.

Swiss auctioneers Koller, who are celebrating 50 years of auctioneering with Jubiliee sales this September, are holding a two-day exhibition of highlights this week on July 9 and 10.

London’s flagship June Impressionist and Modern sales saw Christie’s and Sotheby’s notch up a premium-inclusive total of £298m between them in three days.

A TRIPLE portrait of three Elizabethan girls that sold for £620,000 at Christie’s sale of the Simon Sainsbury Collection has now been identified as a picture of the Egerton sisters from c.1601-2.

Sotheby’s have announced the highlight of their autumn series: an auction of new works consigned by Damien Hirst on September 15-16.

AN historic and important medieval scientific instrument, known as the Canterbury Quadrant, has been saved for the nation. St James’s specialist dealers Trevor Philip and Sons have sold the quadrant to the British Museum for £411,250.

Christie’s King Street devoted an entire day to traditional English furnishings when a 369-lot all-day sale of the collection of the late Simon Sainsbury was followed by a highly select, mixed-owner, 12-lot evening auction of what they termed “exceptional furniture”.

The latest addition to the London street art calendar took place at Village Underground in Shoreditch on June 17, where Dreweatts became the first auctioneer from outside London to host a dedicated Urban Art Sale.

THE embattled dealers at Antiquarius have cautiously welcomed the news that the Kensington and Chelsea council have rejected the landlords’ application to redevelop part of the antiques centre.

Christie’s English furniture day on June 18 was marked by the £9m auction of a dozen pieces of top-flight examples and by the 369-lot £13.6m sale of the collection of the late Simon Sainsbury.

An entire day was devoted to glass by Bonhams earlier this month as they offered just shy of 500 lots of English and Continental glass in their Bond Street rooms.

AN influx of Russian buyers was in town last week to flex their wallets and work their way through a week-long series of Russian sales in four London rooms. On offer was a rich mix of paintings, Fabergé, arms and armour, porcelain, metalware and anything else the auction houses thought might tempt the Russian palate.

A Chelsea antiques dealer has been badly injured after taking on an armed gang who smashed up his premises. Ian Towning, the owner of the Bourbon-Hanby Antique Centre, was subjected to months of intimidation, before he fought back when three men wielding sledgehammers and carrying a gun robbed the centre in Sydney Street, London SW3 on the afternoon of Monday June 9.

Morton and Eden have sold 41 Celtic gold coins found by a metal detectorist in Kent for £35,500. The coins, some of which are shown here, were found over a three-year period between 2003 and 2006, scattered over a ploughed field near Westerham in Kent, the precise location of which is being kept secret.

TWO very different scenes of cricket matches in progress sold recently at very different locations. The artists themselves could also hardly be more contrasting: Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) and L.S. Lowry (1887-1976).

Sotheby’s New York and Christie's King Street both withdrew furniture lots provenanced to dealers John and Carlton Hobbs from sale last week – casualties of the unfolding "fake" furniture scandal first exposed by The Sunday Times.