South-east England

A good helping of late Victorian pictures featured among the top prices on June 6 at Lawrences (20% buyer’s premium) of Bletchingley in Surrey.

The Meissen model of Count Bruhl’s Tailor was a major attraction at Hampshire auction house Jacobs & Hunt (26% buyer’s premium).

This hitherto unknown iron – part of select group of perhaps a dozen very early golf clubs from the late 17th or early 18th century – emerged at Gorringe’s in Lewes on June 26.

Three 18th century English carved and painted wooden dolls, in the same family for over two centuries, were sold at Specialist Auction Services of Newbury on June 19.

Denys Eyre Bower (1905-77) bought for £6000 the 17th century Chiddingstone Castle, near Edenbridge in Kent, filled it to the turrets with his collections of Japanese swords and lacquer, Egyptian antiquities, Stuart and Jacobite history and Buddhism pieces and opened the place to the public.

Putting a third major collection of highly specialist and highly priced material onto the market within little over three years might seem to be asking too much of a limited number of wealthy enthusiasts.

A two-day fair set for June 23-24 has had to be cancelled.

A quartet of oils by the contemporary British painter Sherree Valentine-Daines (b.1959) produced multi-estimate prices when they went under the hammer in Sussex.

Advertising and souvenir fans from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries received a mixed reception at the April 10 Special Auction Services sale at Newbury devoted to works collected by the late Martin Willcocks.

On September 15-16, Macclesfield auctioneer Adam Partridge will be hosting an antiques-hunting weekend based at Hartsfield Manor, just outside Dorking.

Catalogued as Anglo-Indian but probably Indo-Portuguese, this ivory, tortoiseshell and white metal casket, below, was a box of delight for the vendor.

St Augustine of Hippo’s De civitate Dei (below) was penned to counter pagan claims that what had prompted the Visigoth sacking of Rome in 410 was the adoption of Christianity by its emperors. The book was first printed around a thousand years later in the 1460s, but it was 150 years before a first English language edition appeared.

In 1889, the artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) visited the 14th century manor house Ightham Mote in Kent and painted a picture of its occupants playing a game of bowls.

Jackie Edwards knows all about crowds, as she is in her third year of running a busy biannual antiques and vintage fair in five indoor/outdoor locations throughout the market town of Romsey in Hampshire.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

A hundred and eighty lots in a recent West Sussex sale that offered great variety and some real rarities came from the library at West Horsley Place in Surrey.