East of England

Three years since he launched his Suffolk auction house Bishop & Miller, managing director Oliver Miller is fine-tuning his sales line-up.

A good weight and a good name helped this London 1890 embossed silver punch bowl to double the lower estimate at TW Gaze (18% buyer’s premium).

According to Wikipedia, the medieval city of Norwich had at one time 36 parish churches, the largest collection of urban medieval buildings north of the Alps.

As celebrations get under way to mark the centenary of women gaining the right to vote (or over-30s at least), the Modern British art market is showing a growing appetite for 20th century female artists.

Michael Rothenstein’s illustration of Lennie Small and George Millon, the Californian migrant workers whose story is told in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, formed both the jacket illustration and the frontispiece (shown below) to the 1927, first UK edition.

A previously unrecorded painting attributed to Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, the Italian Old Master known as il Guercino (1591-1666), has been consigned to Cambridge auction house Cheffins.

More than 100 paintings owned by the Royal Society of Marine Artists are to be sold at auction in Norfolk.

Sworders is to sell the primary contents of North Mymms Park, Hertfordshire – including a collection of European tapestries that have been at the property for over a century.

Good times ahead were predicted by Guy Schooling, chairman of Sworders (23% buyer’s premium), after the January 9 Homes & Interiors sale at Stansted Mountfitchet which was topped by a WAS Benson brass mantel clock.

Beloved of TV antiques programmes and of bidders knowing the lots are absolutely fresh to market, there are few phrases to stir the blood at an auction as much as ‘from the attic’.

The so-called ‘Great Bardfield Artists’, named after the Essex village where a community of painters and designers lived from the 1930s onwards, has become fertile ground for local auction house Sworders (22% buyer’s premium).

More than 400 lots of railwayana, assembled from the 1950s onwards by a single collector, will be offered at Norfolk auction house TW Gaze on January 5.

This 17th century Indian painting attributed to one of the best artists of the Mughal court sold for £42,000 at Sworders’ December 5 Country House Sale.

Before Natalie Smith opened the Woodbridge Antiques Centre 10 years ago in the pretty Suffolk town, she told ATG that she was given a great piece of advice: never compromise on quality and presentation.

An Old Master portrait of an elderly Stuart woman took £13,200 at Mander Auctioneers (17.5% buyer’s premium) in Suffolk on November 18.