Lyon & Turnbull

Lyon & Turnbull’s (25% buyer’s premium) inaugural Modern Made auction at the Mall Galleries in London received plenty of encouraging noises from the dealing and collecting community as it posted a total of £1m (including premium).

The financial highlight at Lyon & Turnbull’s (25% buyer’s premium) inaugural Modern Made auction at the Mall Galleries in London was provided by an auction record for Malaysian Modernist painter and poet Abdul Latiff Mohidin (b.1938).

The inaugural Modern Made auction held by Lyon & Turnbull at the Mall Galleries in London last week recorded a hammer total of £800,000 (close to £1m including premium).

Pouring wine at the table from a standardised machine-made bottle is a relatively new custom. For centuries before the Victorian era, wine was typically bought and stored in the barrel and decanted into bottles or jugs only before use at the table.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales under £2000, including a work by Scottish painter John Maxwell.

Some areas of the secondary pictures market march to their own beat, appearing to defy the usual forces that determine value. Ancestral paintings are such a category.

Underlined by a £65,000 bid for a table cabinet, the attraction of Indo-Portuguese furniture – that combines familiar European forms with the exotic lure of the East – is as strong today as it was in centuries past.

Some buyers regard sales of dealers’ stock as a minus on the grounds that the lots have been ‘seen’. Others view them as a plus, reckoning the material has already been the choice of an expert.

Lyon & Turnbull is holding an auction of Modern & Contemporary art, sculpture and design at The Mall Galleries in London on March 27 under the title Modern Made.

A small group of lots in a recent Edinburgh sale were once part of the library of the late 5th Earl of Lovelace at Torridon House.

Among the most eagerly-contested lots in the Paul Reeves: An Eye For Design sale at Lyon & Turnbull was this set of Royal Worcester porcelain wall brackets, c.1865, allegorical of the four seasons.

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