East Sussex

The increasingly contentious issue of selling Benin works of art at auction raised its head again last week after an ancestral plaque catalogued as 16th or 17th century was withdrawn from an East Sussex sale.

Two English Orientalists made the biggest impression at a recent sale at Gorringe’s (23% buyer’s premium) in Lewes.

The West as well as the East made a major contribution to the success of Gorringe’s £1m sale on March 30 where, overall, 86% of the 593 lots sold.

This copy of the Uffizi’s Medici Apollo (Apollino) is signed for the Italian sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (c.1716-99).

If the famous image of the Milton Shield by Elkington and its £800-1200 estimate drew a double-take at a recent auction, there was good reason.

Rated a museum-quality piece, this rare c.1902 spirit-fired Märklin fire engine led the field at toys specialist Wallis & Wallis (24% buyer’s premium).

Some of the best US coin discoveries are today made in the UK.

What is perhaps the earliest dated piece of Irish glass sold at auction in Lewes.

A recent fine art auction at Hansons (25% buyer’s premium) included a once magnificent Qianlong (1735-99) copper-red and underglaze blue lantern vase.

Not too many artists appearing at regional auctions have over two million followers on Instagram but, then again, not too many are like Mr Doodle (b.1994).

A small group of Victorian transfer-printed stoneware crocks offered by Taylor’s (24% buyer’s premium) in Montrose on September 16 included a 7½in (18cm) butter crock with the logo of the Lothians Dairy Co of Slate Ford Road, Edinburgh.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

The 80th anniversary of Operation Dynamo, aka the Dunkirk evacuation in May-June 1940, has been in the headlines recently. However, less well known is the fate of the British 51st Highland Division almost 100 miles further along the French coast.

The Chad Valley tinplate toy 'The Climbing Miller' is based closely on an earlier ‘gravity’ toy called 'Gustav the Busy Miller' that was one of Lehmann’s most popular issues made for close to 50 years in the pre-war era.

Svend Hammershøi (1873-1948), younger brother of painter Vilhelm, is best known as a ceramicist but he was also a silversmith.

The name of the Finnish writer and illustrator Tove Jansson (1914-2001) may not be as familiar in the UK as that of many other creators of children’s favourites.

Across the past 13 months Gorringe’s (21% buyer’s premium) in Lewes has dispersed the remarkable assemblage of English porcelain formed by the collector and academic Dr Dennis G Rice.

Appearing in 1937, a couple of years after the locomotive itself was launched, the LMS Princess Elizabeth was the biggest and best locomotive that Hornby ever made.

Since its launch in 1953 there have been well over a dozen distinct references of the Rolex Submariner, with all sorts of minutiae adding up to several hundred different variants.

A cross-section of Asian art – Qing porcelain, Meiji Satsuma and Euro-Asiatic ivories – provided the prizes at Gorringe’s (21% buyer’s premium) spring sale held in Lewes.