West Sussex

Puritan Cotton Mather’s defence of executions is latest work on the subject to surface.

As a young man in the 1960s, British creative designer Anthony Redmile (b.1937) took the London interior design scene by storm. Although his work was hugely eclectic, he became best known for his quirky designs taken from the animal kingdom.

Paul Jenkins (1923-2012), an American Abstract artist and member of the New York School, was born in Kansas City. He worked at a ceramics factory in his youth, an experience that heavily influenced his tactile methods of painting.

Said to date from the 12th-14th century, an incomplete and dampstained Middle Eastern medical manuscript sold for £70,000 at Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) on February 22.

Two items in focus at Midhurst

According to patent documents dated February 1928, Woodlite headlamps invented by a William G Woods of Los Angeles were said to give the driver better illumination of distant objects ahead.

Sold for £4600 in a February 6 sale held in the Chichester salerooms of Stride & Son (18% buyer’s premium) was an album of cut-paper work produced by Elizabeth Cobbold c.1810-20.

New Midhurst owner keeps the Emmott Promotions name going

This early-20th century snow scene, below, was painted by the French artist Paul Elie Gernez (1888-1948). He was primarily a naturalist painter of still-lives, landscapes and seascapes, and spent much of his life in Honfleur in Normandy.

Accounts of youthful travels in Britain and on a Grand Tour contain often blunt assessments

Estimated at £2000-3000, this French gold and enamel bracelet set with seven oval carved hardstone intaglios sold for £8500 (plus 20% buyer premium) at Henry Adams of Chichester on January 16.

It’s a hectic time for Bournemouth-based fair organisers Chris Brown and Geoff Fagan of Grandma’s Attic Fairs as they reorganise their fairs portfolio following their acquisition of the family-run Emmott Promotions.

The binding of a copy of 'Vocabularis rerum' of Wenceslaus Brack sold in a recent West Sussex sale was a 19th century one and now broken, but this was in its time a very popular and much reprinted work.

Adding a classical touch to a highly successful five-day sale at West Sussex auction house Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium) was a 1st century AD Greco-Roman marble lower torso of Aphrodite.

Extinct for 65 million years, dinosaurs continue to rule the world of children visiting the National History Museum, of multi-million dollar movie makers – and of bidders at the Evolution Sales at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

Collectors who missed out on a rare late 19th century cabin trunk at auction last week have the chance to buy another in West Sussex this coming Friday.

Rountree Tryon Galleries celebrates its 60th anniversary next month, leasing out a large barn in Sussex to launch its annual Africa show.

The year after Cedric Morris painted his verdant Foxgloves in 1932, a severe drought cut through much of southern Britain. The parched soil and the hardship it brought were a source of artistic inspiration for those who painted the form and the character of the rural landscape.

Always popular items, a Georgian lead cistern offered at Summers Place Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) was also rare in being circular. Usually they are rectangular, having stood against a wall connected to downpipes.

Variety was certainly in evidence in a West Sussex sale, where the teenage journal of a young stained-glass maker, two broadside ballads and an illustrated dummy for 'Down with Skool!' all brought much higher than predicted bids.