News

In our recent ATG jewellery feature we wrote about how the death of silver designer Stuart Devlin earlier this year and a book he published just beforehand could lead to a reappraisal of his work. When it comes to auctions, a very good market test is coming up soon.

A large 19th century panorama of London, completed towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, has entered the Museum of London’s permanent collection after the institution acquired it at a recent Sotheby’s auction.

The pair to the famous ‘Bainbridge vase’ – knocked down at £43m in 2010 but later sold for half of that sum – is to come to market. Sotheby’s will sell the near identical vase, that has a century-long provenance, in Hong Kong in the autumn.

Frank Frazetta’s painting Escape on Venus does not feature any of the pirates, zombies or ugly communists that appear in the story it accompanies. Still, the picture easily attracted enough attention to make it the top lot at a recent Heritage Auctions sale.

Art dealer Philip Mould and journalist Fiona Bruce of BBC’s ‘Fake or Fortune?’ returned to screens last night, arguing that a still-life painting was the work of Modern British artist William Nicholson (1872-1949).

Dealers Alastair Gibson and Laura Bordignon have taken an advertisement in this week’s Antiques Trade Gazette calling on the trade to petition the government to widen the ‘de minimus’ exemption for antique ivory objects in a forthcoming law that will restrict their trade.

Dealer Rosemary Bandini, who specialises in Japanese netsuke, calls a figure that she sold recently one of her most frustrating yet intriguing discoveries to date.