West Sussex

PETWORTH dealer Richard Gardner never seems to let up, but he is taking some time off to celebrate this week since the West Sussex town, with its 38 showrooms and some 75 dealers, has just won the BACA award for best antiques town/village.

FIRST English editions of the works of Jules Verne have been selling for high prices of late. In a July 6 sale held by Strides of Chichester, the fine copy of Sampson Low’s 10/6d edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, seen right, dated 1873 but possibly issued as early as October of the previous year, sold for £12,000.

A GANG slashed patrol car tyres at Petworth police station before launching an audacious burglary at an antiques shop in the town, escaping with hundreds of pieces of silver.

THIS elaborate late 19th century boulle longcase is typical of the revivalist furnishings that were the stock-in-trade of the Acton-based television and film-props company Period Props and Lighting that closed earlier this year after 30 years in the business. Their inventory was enormous and will provide Rupert Toovey & Co’s (15% buyer’s premium) rooms at Spring Gardens, Washington with a series of sales. The first tranche was offered on June 15.

STAYING with idyllic summer settings, next month Sussex organiser Ron Beech hosts his one fair of the year, the annual Lindfield Antiques Fair, which has been running at the King Edward Hall in the West Sussex village near Haywards Heath for 37 years.

OVER the years, the collaboration between Sotheby’s Sussex and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust has done much to fill in the gaps left by the lack of detailed company records of Coalbrookdale furniture, and the May sale at Billingshurst, which featured 86 lots amassed over a number of years by a dealer/collector, offered another opportunity to assess the market.

FOSSILS, whose decorative qualities in either antique or contemporary settings, have made them a regular feature of Sotheby’s garden sales at Billingshurst, opened the May event with 100 lots. Although dealers have become interested in the genre (there are, for example, now stands selling natural history at Olympia), private buyers took the top offerings including the best seller, a detail of which is shown right.

POLICE are investigating the theft of antiques valued at hundreds of thousands of pounds stolen from Uppark, the National Trust House in West Sussex, overnight on June 6-7.

BOUND in half calf gilt and marbled boards, the three-vol., 1813 second edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that sold for £4600 in a May 21 sale held by John Bellman of Billingshurst bore the pencil initials H.D. for Horace Darwin (Charles Darwin’s son) and his bookplates were to be found in a copy of the 1818, four-vol. first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in a similar but less well-preserved binding that sold at £2500.

For 30 years, the props that have given authenticity to many of viewers’ beloved TV and movie costume dramas, have been supplied by West London specialists Period Props & Lighting.

THE Orient provided the most eye-catching highlights at Rupert Toovey's (15% buyer's premium) March 17-19 sale, in the form of a set of four Japanese Satsuma plates signed by Kinkozan and an 18th century Chinese bamboo carving.

THE way a Maltese connection can lift the price of any item, from watercolours of Valletta to old oak chests, was in evidence at the April 30 sale held at Strides (15% buyer’s premium) of Chichester when this wall clock, right, was offered.

AFTER a five-year gap, Essex organiser Robert Bailey returns to Seaford College for his 30th Petworth Antiques, Fine Art and Investment Fair. He had many successful years at the college near Petworth in West Sussex, then he took a break due to some difficulties over the venue. Now he is back in the college’s Robertson Centre.

COLLECTORS who love the art of L.S. Lowry but can only afford Helen Bradley (1900-1979) were presented with the picture of their dreams when this 11 by 14in (27 x 36cm) oil, right, of the momentous and inspirational meeting between Lowry and Bradley outside the 1955 Saddleworth Art Group’s Exhibition came up for sale at the Chichester rooms of Henry Adams (15% buyer’s premium) on April 28.

ONE of the pleasanter surprises on the fairs front last year was the immediate warm reception the trade gave to the launch of Antiques & Audacity, a new event organised by Gloucester-shire dealer Jan Hicks and staged in the grounds of Arundel Castle, West Sussex.

With a dozen works by the artist currently on show at Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, Sussex auctioneers John Nicholson (15% buyer’s premium) could hardly have picked a better time to offer a watercolour by George Price Boyce (1826-97) than at their March 17 sale in Fernhurst.

WHATEVER the state of the antique silver market, West Sussex specialist Nicholas Shaw is constantly busy engendering business.

Shown right are two highlights from the sale conducted by John Bellman (15% buyer’s premium) of Newpound, Wisborough Green, on February 18.

THE architect of the newly built British Library is to donate 600 art works collected over 50 years to the nation. Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson will hand over the gift to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester via the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund), the UK’s leading independent art charity.

PROMOTION is the strong point of Richard Gardner, chairman of the Petworth Art and Antique Dealers’ Association, and he tells me the association is holding a Treasure Hunt on April 24. The prize actually is well worth winning, a nice antique silver-gilt caster.