News

BRUSSELS have two similar events this month, both of which are festivals rather than fairs, with specialist dealers mounting concurrent selling exhibitions, promoted jointly, and also inviting overseas specialists in the same discipline to show as guests in the Brussels galleries.

MANY were as intrigued as myself at Caroline Penman’s Tythe Barn Experience which took place from May 21 to 23.

MAY is traditionally when the Swiss wheel out their most spectacular sales of Classical coins. This year’s offering (981 lots) came on May 10-11 at Leu (Zurich).

A POSTCARD sent by Joyce to the publisher Elkin Mathews sold for €12,000 (£8170) in a May 18 sale held by Mealy’s in Dublin.

TWO records of witchcraft trials in 17th century Lübeck were among the more successful lots in an April 19 sale held by Swanns of New York.

THIS punting scene by Whistler is one of some 3000 additional original and reproduction etchings and engravings, mostly full-page and many mounted and titled in ink as well as being mounted, where possible opposite the relevant text, that were to be found in an extra-illustrated 1880, third edition of Philip G. Hamerton’s Etchings & Etchers seen at Bonhams on May 6.

IT was in the summer of 2000 that Fran Foster of Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre took her Antiques For Everyone formula to Glasgow in an attempt to establish a large, good quality, vetted Scottish fair, a feat which previous organisers had failed to achieve.