Auctions

Age, practical usage and quality have always made for healthy prices for looking glasses and when one adds today’s demand for the decorative it was not too suprising to see this fine late Regency rococo frame lead the Cheltenham sale held by Bruton Knowles (10 per cent buyer’s premium) back on February 27 where it sold at £12,000.

UK: THE subject matter of the Viking collection sold at Spink on March 14 speaks for itself. Not something to appeal to most Antiques Trade Gazette readers it is worth reporting briefly, mainly to demonstrate the skill that resides in London.

The Bonhams Knightsbridge sale (see above, Henty – the great adventure begins with A Secret for Success) also included a P.G. Wodehouse collection (from a different source) and among the more successful of those lots were these two shown here.

UK: West Country auctioneers Bearne’s of Exeter made headline news last May when they sold a collection of vintage 1850s photographs from William, 2nd Earl of Craven for £1.4m.

UK: WHEN the trade complain about prices at auction, it’s a sure sign of a strong sale.

EIRE: BACK in May last year works by Dublin-born Louis le Brocquy (b.1916) entered the same price bracket as that of his compatriots like Yeats and Lavery when Sotheby’s took a record £1,050,000 (plus buyer’s premium) in London for his work entitled Travelling woman with newspaper.

A superb example of “the quintessential Italian Renaissance book”, a 1545 first of the first Italian translation of Thucydides in a fine Apollo & Pegasus binding made for the famous library of G.B. Grimaldi – a collection of some 200 key works formed under the supervision of the Roman humanist Tolomei. It sold for $140,000 (£96,550).

Sold at $75,000 (£51,725), at the Freilich sale which took place at Sotheby’s New York on January 10 and 11, was a superb copy of the first complete lunar atlas, Hevelius’ Selenographia... of 1647.

One of eight colour printed and hand-finished plates from the only known copy of a work that Fabien Gautier D’Agoty issued in 1777, apparently as a prospectus for his Histoire naturelle ... Règne Minéral.

UK: THE Sussex sale was dominated by the £98,000 bid for L.S. Lowry’s oil on plywood Old Houses (Art Market, Antiques Trade Gazette No. 1479, March 10) but this record bid for the rooms was backed up by a number of pieces of good-quality furniture which saw competitive bidding.

One of 194 full-page engraved plates from a 1588 first of Ramelli’s Le Diverse et artificiose machine..., a study of the science and technology of machines in the Renaissance and one of the more famous illustrated books of the 16th century.

The former Honeyman copy of the Probier Buchlein... and Bergwerk..., two rare booklets on assaying dated 1524 and ’33 (the latter with two leaves in photocopy) produced one of the shock results of Haskell F. Norman sale in 1998 when it made $80,000 – 20 times the estimate.

A spread from a 1491 first edition of the most comprehensive and richly illustrated medical or natural history publication of the 15th century, the Hortus sanitatis.

Four lots from a service once owned by the Duke of Orléans were among the more unusual offerings among the stash of 18th century Tournai porcelain presented by Beaussant-Lefèvre at Drouot on March 7.

UK: A HOUSEHOLD name in the 1930s-40s, Mabel Lucie Atwell (1879-1964) is today a very collectable name as was shown when this Shelley three-piece tea service, right, was offered at Potteries Specialist Auctions (buyer’s premium 11.75 per cent) on February 24.

Interleaved throughout with blank leaves, 19 of which bear the author’s annotations, this is Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s own copy of his landmark work on the evolution of species, an 1801 first of Systême des animaux sans vertèbres, ou tableau général des classes, des ordres et des genre de ces animaux in a contemporary binding.

BACK IN the mid-1990s, when Far Eastern buyers were sending prices through the roof and people were (supposedly) stocking up for their Millennium parties, fine wine was one of the most excitingly volatile of all auction markets.

US: JUST as it was with the Morris bird books featured in last week’s Antiquarian Books pages (see issue no. 1481), we are looking here at a very familiar set of books in an unfamiliar context.

UK: BOXLOCK shotguns are the most common of British fowling firearms and those with bolt-actions are certainly not unusual, but this particular model, left, aroused great interest at Weller and Dufty’s (15 per cent premium) arms and armour auction in Birmingham on March 14.

UK: THE current strength of the silver market for unusual pieces has been discussed in theAntiques Trade Gazette of recent weeks and the Cambridge auctioneers two-day sale showed that the trend is no different in East Anglia.