Furniture

If a 74% selling rate points to continued selectivity among furniture bidders, the hammer total of £534,000 achieved at Dreweatts’ (24% buyer’s premium) 275-lot Fine Furniture and Works of Art sale showed they also have money to spend – “a trend we’ve seen for a while now”, said auctioneer Ben Brown.

A hand-coloured design for Charles Voysey’s 'River Rug' surfaced at Lawrences of Crewkerne where it sold at £21,000 (plus premium).

This 19th century French walnut chest of drawers, offered at Ewbank’s (22.5% buyer’s premium) Surrey rooms, sold at £5500.

In the year of the 150th anniversary of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s birth, Lyon & Turnbull has sold the very key used to open his design masterpiece, The Glasgow School of Art, in 1899.

Two William and Mary side tables, one period and the other catalogued as ‘style’, bringing different results in March.

When Frances Noble, head of Dix Noonan Webb’s jewellery department, was shown this coronet with a family tradition connecting it to the Duke of Wellington, it was caked with dirt.

A panel front from a cassone will feature in the April 24 sale of Old Master paintings to be held by Dorotheum in Vienna.

Henry Wynne (fl.1654-1709), master of the Clockmaker’s Company, produced the finest and largest double-horizontal sundials of the Restoration period.

A round-up of art and antiques news from the previous seven days, including news of Ronald Phillips' Chippendale exhibition.

“It’s not the age or pedigree – it’s the look of the piece.” The phrase became less a heresy and more a cliché during the latter years of the furniture boom of blessed memory, when the increasingly influential decorator trade was spending substantial sums on 19th and early 20th century reproductions.

Considering retiring and selling up, the owner of a Cornish B&B owner consigned the George III, japanned chest on stand, below, to Honiton saleroom Chilcotts (19.5% buyer’s premium) to test the market.

On a lesser scale than the exceptional £35,000 George II chairs at Holloway’s sale, but standing out from the general run of brown furniture, were other encouraging results across the country in February.

Dwarfed as they were by the £440,000 oil of St John the Evangelist (see ATG last week, No 2332), a number of other lots helped to make Holloway’s (20% buyer’s premium) first major sale of the year in Banbury on February 27 an event to remember.

The first annual exhibition at English Antiques, in the small Suffolk market town of Eye, is titled 'A Taste of the Orient'.

“Mid-century is pretty unstoppable as the ‘new antique’ with exhibitions on Fifties and Sixties designers like Charles and Ray Eames and Harry Bertoia now regular events,” says Lucy Ryder Richardson, founder with Petra Curtis of the Midcentury Modern Shows.