News

UK: FURTHER evidence that it is the strong abstract designs that are most popular in the Clarice Cliff market could be seen last week at Bonhams & Brooks (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) on June 12. Leading their 104-lot sale at £3600 was an 11-piece coffee service decorated in the Mondrian pattern while the preceding lot – two coffee cans and saucers decorated in the sought after Football pattern – easily left behind a modest £200-300 estimate to sell for £1150.

UK: ONE of numerous full-page woodcut illustrations of bridles, bits, etc. to be found in a 1602 Naples first of Piero Antonio Ferraro’s Cavallo Frenato..., bound in contemporary limp vellum, that sold at £1950 (Traylen) in the Dominic Winter, Swindon (buyer's premium 12.5 per cent) sale.

UK: TOPPING Christie’s June 14 English furniture sale at £420,000 was this pair of marble-topped side tables attributed to the Cobb and Vile partnership.

UK: STILL relatively new to the auctioneering world as independent auctioneers, the husband and wife team of S.J. Hales (15 per cent buyer’s premium) have already built up a nationwide reputation for Staffordshire and one that was enhanced at their May 30 sale when they could offer this rare early Samuel Alcock porcellaneous pair of leopard groups.

There will be much more to come on the £2m Lewis Carroll’s Alice at Sotheby’s on June 6, but this week just one of ten recorded prints of Dodgson’s 1858 portrait of Alice Liddell as ‘The Beggar Maid’, which sold for £160,000.

UK: AS EVEN the upper echelons of the trade cannot afford to stick to academic standards at the expense of turning a profit in the market for the purely decorative, one finds increasingly serious sums of money paid out for amusing trifles of zero antiquity, such as a large pair of 20th century Continental jardinières, one of which is shown here.

UK: ALTHOUGH there were no huge prices among the 416 lots at these Devon rooms, there was success across the wide range of offerings.