Letter

The latest Specialist Collectors’ Sale at Cuttlestones in Wolverhampton included a little bit of 20th century ceramics history.

Several decades on from the last of the five major auctions Sotheby’s held to disperse items from the remarkable collections of American historical documents and letters formed by Philip (1902-75) and Elsie Sang (1906-97), a further selection appeared at Sotheby’s New York (26/20/13.9%).

In 1793, well in advance of the Slave Trade Act (1807) and the Slavery Abolition Act (1833), 275 British men, women and children attempted to settle an uninhabited island off the coast of Sierra Leone.

Letter highlights early fossil fan Mary Anning who is soon to be the subject of a film.

MADAM – The auction report (issue 2459, page 22) highlighting the sale of two Napoleonic documents at Sotheby’s is most interesting when you consider the two very different characters they were addressed to.

A cache of material related to the influential Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61) and her family sold for close to £50,000 at Lawrences of Crewkerne.

An exceptionally varied and very successful recent Scottish sale contained a great many letters and plenty of fascinating manuscript material.

A letter in which Kenneth Grahame writes about the suicide of his son, Alastair, sold at East Bristol Auctions (18% buyer’s premium) for £1200.

An account of travels in Indian territories in the early 19th century was one of two letters of particular North American interest sold for notably higher than expected sums by Forum (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

A signed memorandum letter sent by Nelson from HMS Victory to one of his captains sold for a mid-estimate £3200 at a recent TW Gaze (18% buyer’s premium) auction in Diss in Norfolk.

A selection of upcoming lots of books, maps and prints from auctions taking place around the UK.

One of the many memorable scenes in Charles Dickens’ 'Bleak House' was the portrayal of the apparent spontaneous combustion of Mr Krook, leaving “the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes”.

One of the biggest surprises at Nagel’s (33% buyer’s premium) sale in Stuttgart on October 16-17 came right at the end of the auction.

“There is no such thing as modern art, there is only art and it is perpetual.” The author of these lines was, perhaps surprisingly, the highly modern Austrian painter Egon Schiele and are part of an artistic manifesto written on July 17, 1911.