News

Pictures released of some of the stolen items

The London Assay Office is advising extra caution when buying antique silver following the assessment of spoons bearing forged marks submitted by four auctioneers last year.

A revamp of Cologne’s early spring fairs fest sees the amalgamation of the city’s three February fairs into one new five-day event to be held a week earlier in the year.

The Victoria & Albert Museum’s sculpture collection will be redisplayed this spring in the new Dorothy and Michael Hintze Galleries.

Establishing a new landmark for a picture lot sold at auction outside London, two portraits by Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) took £900,000 at Dreweatt Neate’s Donnington Priory salerooms last week.

Alongside the Americana offered in the New York salerooms earlier this month, there was a strong representation of early English ceramics. Sotheby’s January 20 sale of the pottery collection of Harriet Carlton Goldweitz was followed the next day by Christie’s auction of the Mrs J. Insley Blair collection, which included some key Staffordshire productions alongside its blue chip American furnishings.

A Susie Cooper vase sold for £3850 on eBay on January 13. The vase, which measures just over 12in (30cm) high, is decorated with a hunter in a loin cloth stalking two deer or ibex close to a stylised tree – an unrecorded design of around 1931 or ’32. Similar pieces are known from a publicity shot taken in the 1930s although most were thought to have been destroyed during a hit on the factory during the Blitz.