2011

IN what promises to be the biggest test of the overall health of the Victorian picture market for some years, Lyon & Turnbull will sell the entire contents of Old Battersea House, the London home of the Forbes family, in Edinburgh on November 1.

PICTURED here, Abigail Selwood, winner of the 2011 NAVA Auctioneer of the Year Competition is presented with the rosebowl by the association chairman Guy Charrison.

FOURTEEN antiques of ‘significant, cultural and historic value’ have been recovered and two men arrested in connection with three high-profile country house thefts in 2009.

As ever, there was a large amount of Doulton Lambeth on offer at Bonhams’ latest Ceramics Design sale.

THE famous caricature birds crown the top of the tree for Martinware collectors. This is still a strong market where, feels Bonhams’ specialist Mark Oliver, a really top-calibre model could command £40,000 if it came on the market.

Modern British art played its part in the recent London print sales when ‘The Merry-Go-Round’ by Cyril Power (1872-1951) drew strong bidding at Sotheby’s on September 27 and ‘Adonis in Y fronts’, a 1963 screenprint by Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), led the day at Christie’s South Kensington on September 20.

Becoming the most expensive painting ever sold in Ireland, A Fair Day, Mayo by Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) was knocked down at €1m (£917,430) at Adam's lastest sale in Dublin.

HONITON in Devon is the first town to announce a major festival to mark National Antiques Week.

This week sees the launch of Figaro Enchères, a joint venture between ATG Media and French national newspaper Le Figaro.

STITCH holes in a volume held by a Polish museum have added a new layer of evidence in establishing a disputed drawing as an important work by Leonardo da Vinci.

THE thwack of the polo mallet was replaced by the repeated thud of the gavel earlier this month at the Cowdray estate in West Sussex, celebrated as one of the great British polo venues and the seat of the Viscount Cowdray.

Lowestoft porcelain specialist and Suffolk auctioneer Russell Sprake is marking 50 years in the auction business this month with perhaps his finest ever sale.

ON a sparkling evening at Sotheby’s in Bond Street last Thursday, Henry Wyndham presided over a charity auction in aid of the Company of Arts Scholars, Dealers and Collectors’ charity fund, raising over £60,000 to support the education of young people seeking careers in all areas of the decorative arts from dealing and auctioneering to museums and galleries.

BRITAIN'S dealers and auctioneers are being encouraged to promote themselves as never before in the search for the country's best antiques businesses.

CORDIER Antiques & Auctions of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania have announced the opening of their new auction house at 1500 Paxton Street in the city of Harrisburg.

AUCTIONEERS Martel Maides of St Peter Port in Guernsey were amazed to encounter this Channel Islands silver table bell in a recent over-the-counter valuation.

The major houses’ latest New York Asian series highlighted the dominance of the Chinese art market.

THE largest 'Conjuring' sale seen in London for some time, at Bloomsbury Auctions on September 8, had at its core the 460-lot collection of the late Bob Read, a 'Close-Up Entertainer' and lecturer in the UK and USA who was a tireless researcher into the history of magic and conjuring.

CLAUDE Aguttes, the dynamic auctioneer with salerooms at Neuilly and Lyons, has been named president of a new conseil de surveillance or supervisory board to oversee the running of the Hôtel Drouot.

BONHAMS Scotland is to establish two new departments at its Edinburgh headquarters in Queen Street.