News

ACQUIRED for £52,000 by the Australian businessman John Schaeffer at Christie’s, London in June 1996, this striking oil on canvas, right, A Dancing Athlete with an Olive Branch, by Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), comes under the hammer again on May 15.

ANTIQUE folk art specialist Robert Young’s distinctive stock has found favour both here and in America, very often at fairs, but from May 14 to 22 you can see some choice pieces displayed on his home patch at the fifth annual exhibition at his showrooms at 68 Battersea Bridge Road, London SW11.

JOHN Varley Senior (1778-1842) was one of the most prolific watercolourists of his generation, exhibiting no fewer than 700 works at the Old Water Colour Society between 1805 and 1842.

TWO albums of 19th century Chinese photographs assembled by a British diplomat sold for £5200 in a general antiques sale held by Sworders at Stansted Mountfitchet, on March 30.

A SUBSTANTIAL reward is being offered after thieves smashed a dealer’s car window and made off with a large amount of jewellery at Sandown Park Fair on April 27.

ONE of the most acclaimed exhibitions of the late March Asian Art Week in New York was London dealers’ Rossi & Rossi’s show Styles from the Steppes: Silk Costumes and Textiles from the Liao and Yuan Periods.

SATISFYING though Woolley & Wallis’s sale undoubtedly was, the general run of fine silver is still bringing little more than the prices it was achieving a decade and more back.