News

AS the antiquities trade brace themselves to cope with the fall-out of the mass looting of artefacts in Iraq, a UK stolen art database takes centre stage once more. Trade organisations in Britain and around the world have acted immediately to ensure members follow guidelines that will prevent any dealing in pieces that may have been looted during the recent Iraq war.

Illustrated are a pair of ice pails, covers and liners from the Duke of Newcastle’s Derby porcelain service, c.1797, dispersed by Mellors and Kirk in Nottingham on April 10.

Among the miniatures and novelties at Dreweatt Neate’s 2 April sale, there was especial interest in a 37-lot private collection of card-cases amassed over 50 years by an Oxfordshire vendor.

FRENCH auctioneers are trying to build links with the British Art Market Federation to campaign against damaging European Union regulations which are driving business across the Atlantic to the USA.

A private collection of 99 microscopes was the highlight of this three-day sale at John Bellmans. No fewer than nine examples realised four-figure sums, the best seller being a 19th century lacquered brass binocular petrological microscope by Watson & Sons which sold to a private collector from London at £3100.

Two early watercolour drawings of rabbits in snowy settings were offered as part of a Bonhams sale of April 1. That seen right shows one rabbit making a snowball while another leans on a fence, while in the illustration reproduced below right, the two rabbits are building a snowman.

THE status of Sir Kyffin Williams (b.1918) as Wales’s most famous living artist and one of the Principality’s principal artistic exports, was once again confirmed when this oil on canvas, right, Pentraeth, Anglesey took £10,000 at Christie’s South Kensington.