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AN early 19th century bowfront chest of five over three drawers, mahogany strung with satinwood. Doesn’t sound too special does it? That’s until you realise that the description is of a fully fitted tea caddy measuring just 91/2in by 8in high (24 by 20cm). Lots of interest in this rare novelty saw it climb to take the top price of David Lay’s mammoth Penzance sale at £4400.

FOR decades it baffled many that Scotland could not host a major, vetted quality antiques fair of any size, but that changed in 2000 when Fran Foster of Centrex, the organising arm of Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, took her successful Antiques For Everyone formula to the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre and launched Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow.

Miety Heiden, Sotheby’s Amsterdam (22% buyer’s premium) picture specialist had a sneaking suspicion that Schelde Roeier, an oil on canvas by Belgian Expressionist Constant Permeke (1886-1952), would do well when it was offered in the 170-lot May 27 sale of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Dutch capital. But no-one was prepared for the record breaking sum.

Highest bid among the 158 lots of Impressionist & Expressionist works on paper in the Tremmel collection auctioned by Ketterer Kunst on May 5-6 was the €130,000 (£89,700), just over top-estimate, paid in the room by a Rhineland dealer against six telephone bidders for Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Fränzi am Wasser Liegend (Fränzi Reclining at the Waterside, c.1910) in gouache, watercolour and chalk, 13 x 17in (33 x 43.5cm).

THOUGH the May 21 sale held by Dominic Winter was a collectors’ sale that also included motoring, maritime and railway models, photographs, prints, etc., it was the aviation material that had star billing. There was yet another selection from the Amédée Gauthier collection of photographs, arranged as before in thematic lots.

Included among the fountains, wellheads and lead figures at Sotheby’s Sussex on 20-21 May were 18 watering cans from the collection built up over 15 years by John Massey, a senior director of the famous Haws Watering Can Company for over 25 years.

Sotheby’s wait for a change of climate to see prices grow after statuary sale falters: Sotheby's specialist-in-charge of the Sussex garden statuary sales, Rupert van der Werff, believes the most reliable barometer for this area is the housing market. Certainly the well-publicised recession in that overheated area has had a hugely detrimental effect on statuary.