Art and antiques news from 2006

Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton was one of the most notorious British commanders of the American Revolution. After leading a series of successful operations in both the north and south, he returned home after the war as one of the most famous men in England, sat for a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and began a long-term affair with actress and royal consort Mary Robinson.

SEAFAIR, the ambitious project of a floating antiques selling exhibition along the Eastern seaboard of the United States, has delayed its launch from late this year to next June.

Italy has witnessed a sudden, perhaps unexpected, surge in its auction scene with a series of record-breaking sales at Sotheby’s, the most remarkable of which has been the Milan sale of a cycle of Tiepolo canvases on May 30.

Before The Great War the Lincoln engineering company, William Foster and Co, was synonymous with the very best threshing machines. By 1918, managing director Sir William Tritton, together with Major W.G. Wilson, had been credited by the Royal Commission as the inventor of an armoured fighting vehicle forever known as the tank.

THE British Antique Dealers’ Association have called off plans for their much-debated January fair in New York.

Auction house acquire leading Old Master dealer with debts of $26m

Cadogan Tate Fine Art have launched a new weekly transport service from London and Paris to Switzerland to meet the growing demand for discreet fine art transport.

As if they will need it, some of the lots included in Christie’s June 13-14 sale of items from the collection of HRH The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930-2002) have received a little posthumous pepping up.

Southampton Solent University will officially launch their new Art, Design and Society Scheme on Friday June 23.

Rare and significant works of art from the Old World will just occasionally surface, unrecorded, in the New.

This very fine early Regency period drum table c.1805 in a faded honey-coloured rosewood prompted an extraordinary bidding battle at Clevedon Salerooms near Bristol on June 1. Estimated at £4000-6000, it sold at a house record £200,000 (plus 15% buyer’s premium) to a member of the London trade. The underbidder was also a London dealer.

JUST weeks after Clarion abandoned plans for reviving a Glasgow fair a group of Scottish dealers have announced a new Scottish event, The Merchants’ Hall Fine Art & Antiques Fair to be held in Edinburgh from September 22-24.

This is the month the trade in London really goes into overdrive, starting this week with the opening of The Summer Fair, Olympia on Thursday (June 8). Olympia is just one of four major London June fairs and these are complemented by an increasing number of dealer exhibitions around the capital.

AN unseen and apparently unique collection of photographs, letters and maps that illuminates the campaigns of Field Marshall Montgomery in the Second World War has emerged at Kent auctioneers Watermans.

Call for dealers to sign up as specials

A NEW record for Ming porcelain set by a king of Las Vegas provided the headline, but the real story of Christie’s anniversary series in Hong Kong was the rise and rise of Modern and Contemporary Asian art. This relatively new visitor to the global auction market has now eclipsed more traditional collecting disciplines as Christie’s biggest earner in Hong Kong.

Giving Scotland’s once-neglected art glass further standing in the saleroom, a good range of Monart and Ysasrt glass emerged at auction recently North of the Boarder.

LONDON-based organisers Gay Hutson and Angela ‘Bunny’ Wynn are relaunching their February Art on Paper as a broader-based international art fair. The first 20/21 International Art Fair will be held at The Royal College of Art, Kensington from February 22 to 25, 2007.

Over 500 clients participated in Christie’s inaugural sale in Dubai last month at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers Hotel.

Madame Tussauds added Winston Churchill to their waxwork tableaux for the first time in 1908, but had produced another half dozen portraits before his death in 1965. The last of them was put up for sale by Dominic Winter on May 18.