Auctions

UK: AS yet there are no signs that game fishing is to become an endangered sport to follow hunting and shooting, not that the market for angling collectables is floundering on the bank of public indifference.

UK: ABOUT 30 years ago a local private lady purchased this 5.2in (13cm) high Charles II flat-lidded silver tankard, pictured right, for £6 at a Cumbrian jumble sale: a generation later, having realised its potential worth, she decided to place the vessel into the hands of the Cumbrian auctioneers Penrith Farmers’ & Kidd’s (10 per cent buyer’s premium) for their sale on September 29.

UK: THE world record auction price for a photograph was broken twice at the Sotheby’s London sale of the Photographic Collection of Marie-Thérèse and André Jammes on October 27.

SWEDEN at the end of the 19th century was the birthplace of notable inventors of mechanical music who later made their fortunes in America.

UK: THIS pair of vases, 11in (28cm) high, from the sideboard of a house in Herstmonceux, East Sussex, set a new record for Moorcroft when they appeared at Gorringes Lewes on October 19.

US: PROFITS from the catalogue for Christie’s New York’s October 27 and 28 Marilyn Monroe auction may bring as much as the sale itself.

NETHERLANDS: Van Gogh’s oil landscape A Park in Spring, was the highlight of the inaugural exhibition to mark the opening of Sotheby’s new Netherlands headquarters on October 15.

EIRE: The long-awaited auction of one of Ireland’s foremost collections took place in Dublin on October 14 when Mealy’s, in association with Christie’s, dispersed the contents of 25 Fitzwilliam Street Upper, former residence of the late James Murnaghan, a Justice of the Supreme Court and chairman of the National Gallery of Ireland.

UK: Charles Napier Hemy’s seascape Life 4ft 6in x 6ft (1.24m x 1.83m), signed and dated 1913, with reverse inscription, set a record for Salisbury auctioneers Woolley & Wallis on October 12 when it sold for a double mid-estimate £110,000 plus premium.

UK: BRIGG auctioneers DDM hit the headlines after selling a household vinyl blind decorated with art work by David Hockney for £11,000 (plus 10 per cent premium).

UK: THE late 19th century cranberry glass and gilt metal ‘self-perpetuating table fountain’, pictured right, was the executive desktop toy of its day.

UK: The Ant Hills of Commerce, 20 x 141/4in (51 x 36cm), Richard Wynne Nevinson’s oil on canvas scene of New York, was consigned from a local deceased estate which had owned it for more than 50 years to George Kidner of Lymington, Hants, where it was estimated at £15,000-20,000.

UK: SEPTEMBER 22 was a big day for English porcelain, it saw the first part of Bernard Watney’s celebrated collection of early English porcelain go under the hammer at Phillips. A packed saleroom filled to capacity with collectors and dealers contested the 447 lots to over £665,000, way past the pre-sale predictions.

UK: THE Russians had the brains for a head start in the space race but the Americans possessed the capital to fund a sustained interest in rocket programmes.

UK: SINCE new Treasure Trove laws were introduced over a year ago the number of reported treasure finds has increased sevenfold, from 25 a year to 179.

UK: THE autumn sale season got properly under way last week with three sales in the ‘Country House’ vein. Offered from Vost’s at Tattersalls in Newmarket on September 16 were the contents of Badlington Manor, the property of the retired stock broker Mr Keith Heathcote.

UK: NOSTRADAMUS made a career of it, as have a host of soothsayers through the ages, but many of them were less prophetic than a one-off special edition of the Daily Mail printed more than 70 years ago.

UK: WHEN the wife of a descendant from the ancient Scottish clan of Macleod walked into the Sussex salerooms of Gorringes with this unassuming little silver tumbler, few realised that it had been witness to a gruesome Highlands murder more than two centuries before.

UK & US: THE former Director of Phillips in America, Paul Roberts, has been appointed both vice chairman of the new-look Edinburgh outfit Lyon and Turnbull and president of Freeman Fine Arts of Philadelphia, with the aim of forging business links between Scotland and America's oldest independent auctioneers.

UK: IT is about as accurate as a relief map moulded from pearlware could be, but why, assembled dealers and collectors at Sotheby’s Gleneagles were asking themselves, was the title of the country to the piece, left, inscibed upside down?