News

A combination of vendors reluctant to consign the best quality goods and cautious bidding from the trade created a fairly low-key atmosphere at London’s traditional pre-Christmas round of Old Master picture sales.

COSTAS Kleanthous, pictured right, has been appointed a director of the board of LAPADA, the UK’s largest professional art and antique dealers’ association.

WHILE the Irish picture market continues to boom, the Scottish market showed serious jitters at Bonhams Edinburgh (17.5% buyer’s premium) on the evening of December 5.

LOUISE MacBain, chief executive and leading financial backer of Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg, has stepped down from her post with the company.

LARS Tharp officially declared Rupert Toovey’s huge new Sussex saleroom open at last week’s public viewing. Mr Tharp, who is a consultant expert to the auctioneers, echoed Mr Toovey’s own sentiments that his firm’s commitment to such a large undertaking showed how much confidence they had in the future of provincial auctioneering.

HOW can coins being sold on the rostrum in New York be sitting safely locked up in London and elsewhere at the same time? That is the conundrum facing the coins and medals world following the publication of a catalogue and results from a sale organised in New York by Riccardo Paolucci, a Yorkshire-based Italian dealer.

It must be the dream insurance policy: compensation for loss and the return of the goods stolen. But for security giant Chubb, it was a claim too far when wealthy art lover Michael Clarke-Jervoise demanded he be handed back a 17th century Dutch masterpiece for which they had earlier paid him £125,000 in compensation.