News

VETERAN Chelsea organiser, Hove-based Cindy Mainwaring, is delighted to announce that as from this Sunday, September 28, the newly-formed Fulham branch of the Women’s Institute, universally known as the WI, will run the catering at her monthly fairs at Chelsea Old Town Hall.

At just over $12m (including premium) US auction house Doyle New York made a significant contribution to the series of Asian Art sales held in Manhattan last week with their September 16 auction of the F. Gordon Morrill collection of Chinese porcelain. They found buyers for 82 per cent of the 115 lots, but far and away the star attraction was this large 141/2in (37cm) high Yuan dynasty blue and white pilgrim flask of c.1345.

TRAVEL POSTERS: The annual travel poster sale held by Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) usually enjoys a keen collectors’ following, with buyers drawn by the evocative nostalgia and romance of a bygone age when the train rather than the car was the principal method of reaching one’s holiday destination.

Modern British’s reputation as the market of the moment was underlined at Sotheby’s Olympia (20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 10 when the trade had their last major opportunity to buy stock before the 20/21 British Art Fair.

THERE were very few books in the September 9 antiques sale held by Sworders of Stansted Mountfitchett, but one of them was a copy of Charles Dickens’ The Chimes that was signed and inscribed to a man with whom Dickens was later to become involved in a tiresome and disagreeable round of threats of litigation – an episode that was categorised in the title of a 1996 American book on the subject as The Charles Dickens-Thomas Powell Vendetta.

ONE of the Home Counties’ longest running vetted, quality events, the Surrey Antiques Fair, will be held for the 36th year from October 2 to 5 and it will be the end of an era as this is the last staging at its original venue, the Guildford Civic Hall.

The Lewes auctioneers Gorringe’s (15% buyer’s premium) experienced one or two pleasant surprises in the third-day picture section of their September 9-11 sale. Alan Windsor’s Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-1990 describes the Wakefield-born, Slade-trained Mark Senior (1862-1927) as an artist whose “early painting was influenced by Clausen whilst later work reflected the techniques of Steer, Whistler, Boudin and the Impressionists”.