News

Coming up in Galashiels... The Yorkshire Arts and Crafts cabinetmaker Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson hardly needs an introduction. His distinctive adzed oak furniture, each piece relief-carved with a small mouse, proved so successful that a menagerie of imitators sprang up in the 1950s and ’60s.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s failed to establish saleroom predominance in Paris in 2002, the first full year in which, thanks to France’s recent auction reform, they have been allowed to stage auctions on French soil.

SLOAN’S auctioneers of Washington DC have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a bid to keep the company afloat. The move follows recent reports that the company had debts of up to $5m and a string of unpaid consignors.

RICHARD Madley, former president of Christie’s East, New York, has returned to the UK and joined Hamptons with a view to increasing the firm’s presence in the auction market.

THE future of Stonegate Antiques Centre in York has been thrown into confusion amid a legal row and a police investigation into whether owner Anthony Gilberthorpe should face criminal charges.

Understandably, the Russians left this one behind when they liberated the Reichstag in 1945, but a Tommy NCO with a sense of humour decided to rescue this beleaguered portrait of the First World War German Field Marshall and Weimar president Paul von Hindenburg, right, from the ruins and take him back to the West Country.

THE first quality fair of 2003 is one of Robert Bailey’s strongest events, the 11th Cheshire New Year Antiques and Fine Art Fair at Tatton Park, Knutsford, Cheshire. It runs from January 3 to 5.