Ceramics

June saw the fourth and final episode in the dispersal of the Ken Smith Collection of Staffordshire pot lids and Prattware by Reading auctioneers Special Auction Services (15% buyer’s premium inc. vat). The 240 lots from the collection, mainly four items per lot, formed part of the 1000-lot event over the weekend of June 9 & 10 and contributed £47,400 to the hammer total of £207,500 for the whole collection of which only a remarkable 23 lots failed to get away.

UK: Sleek, stylish, Art Deco abstraction is what counts most in a design for Clarice Cliff collectors and this piece, which came up for sale at Phillips (15/10% buyer’s premium) on July 5 possessed it in spades.

The Doulton Lambeth Wares by Desmond Eyles is the classic reference book on the products of the Royal Doulton’s famous factory in London – started in 1815 for the lowly task of saltglazing sewer pipes – but the original edition is long out of print.

The two letters IF are the initials of this mug’s owner, but IF could equally be read as an expression of desire, of conditional optimism, when you realise why the mug was made.

UK: THE biannual sale of ceramics, glass, Oriental wares and decorative arts at Phillips’ Midlands operation saw keen enough trade and private bidding to produce a £138,000 sale total with a very respectable 82 per cent sold by lot.

A sale of more than 400 lots at Phillips, Leeds on June 5– of which 80 per cent sold bringing a total of £122,000 – gave dealers and collectors from as far away as America and Australia an opportunity to assess the middle range of collectable glass and ceramics.

UK: CHRISTIE'S South Kensington (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) chalked up another strong result to add to their successful run of mixed- and single-owner Staffordshire pottery auctions with the sale on June 14 of 273 lots from the Oxfordshire dealer Robin Sanders and Sons. A selection that also took in blue and white pearlware and ironstone tablewares but majored on Staffordshire figures, it saw all but 13 lots change hands netting £145,000.

UK: ONE rarely gets the chance to auction an auctioneer’s advertisement, at least in ceramic form, but this is what happened when Greenslade Taylor Hunt (15 per cent buyer's premium) offered this matched pair of early 19th century Derby figures, right, at their Taunton salerooms on May 31.

UK: CORNISHWARE may be at the lower-priced end of the ceramics market but there is no shortage of enthusiasm as was evident when this 71/4in (18.5cm) jar, illustrated here, sold at £600 at the ‘Kitchenalia’ sale held by niche-market specialist BBR (10 per cent buyer’s premium) on May 20.

UK: FURTHER evidence that it is the strong abstract designs that are most popular in the Clarice Cliff market could be seen last week at Bonhams & Brooks (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) on June 12. Leading their 104-lot sale at £3600 was an 11-piece coffee service decorated in the Mondrian pattern while the preceding lot – two coffee cans and saucers decorated in the sought after Football pattern – easily left behind a modest £200-300 estimate to sell for £1150.

UK: STILL relatively new to the auctioneering world as independent auctioneers, the husband and wife team of S.J. Hales (15 per cent buyer’s premium) have already built up a nationwide reputation for Staffordshire and one that was enhanced at their May 30 sale when they could offer this rare early Samuel Alcock porcellaneous pair of leopard groups.

UK: AS EVEN the upper echelons of the trade cannot afford to stick to academic standards at the expense of turning a profit in the market for the purely decorative, one finds increasingly serious sums of money paid out for amusing trifles of zero antiquity, such as a large pair of 20th century Continental jardinières, one of which is shown here.

UK: ONE of only three in existence, this Sir Stanley Matthews Royal Doulton Character jug shocked all in attendance at Louis Taylor in Stoke-in-Trent on June 11.

UK: IN a very busy month for the ceramics world ahead of June’s International Ceramics Fair in London, a couple of unusual items led the first day of this Staffordshire sale although neither was from the Potteries.

UK: CERAMICS took the top spots at this 1650-lot Cotswolds sale in the form of a pair of mid-19th century Continental majolica stick stands.

AUSTRALIA: A COLLECTION of classic 18th century English and German porcelain gave a flying start to Christie’s Australia’s (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) mammoth 575-lot, mixed-owner auction of Decorative Arts in Melbourne on May 28-29.

UK: With a sale total of £30,256 for 442 lots of ‘breweriana’, Alan Blakeman of BBR Auctions chalked up yet another niche market success on May 13.

UK: THE penultimate Doulton outing held by Phillips (15/10% buyer’s premium) on March 27 was the 263-lot offering of prototype figures from the Doulton archives, an event which proved highly successful for both auctioneer and vendor being a near sellout and almost doubling predictions at £425,570.

UK: THE Internet has, so far, hardly lived up to the initial claims made for it in the auctioneering world, but it does have its merits, as the Staffordshire firm Wintertons will attest.

UK: A striking amalgam of European form and Oriental decoration, this Meissen derived Kakiemon tankard was a rare hybrid, apparently one of only four in public record, and it consequently attracted worldwide interest at Woolley and Wallis’s sale in Salisbury on May 23.