News

The Maritime sale held by Bonhams (15/10% buyer’s premium) in their New Bond Street rooms on January 16 was a sizeable 400-lot affair divided roughly 50/50 into paintings and maritime artefacts – the latter featuring anything from ship models to scrimshaw, divers’ helmets to sextants.

TRADING Standards are taking a softly, softly approach over the enforcement of the Kent Act, as dealers found at the first chance to test it at a major fair – Detling – on January 26-27.

BELGIUM (£1=BFr63): Antwerp's Campo Vlaamse Kaai enjoyed a pleasant pre-Christmas surprise at their two-day sale on December 11/12 when A Hostage, a large work by Edmund Blair Leighton (1853-1922) measuring 3ft 8in by 4ft 10in (1.12 x 1.48m), featuring a girl leaning on a wall, gazing wistfully out to sea, raced to BFr3.1m (£49,200) against an inexplicably low estimate of BFr8000-12,000.

A large, gilt-copper altar statue of Amitayus, the Buddha of Infinite Life, on a lotus flower base, right, 3ft 2in (96cm) tall and hailing from Inner Mongolia/Dolonnor or China (c.1700), proved the main attraction at Nagel’s Asian Art sale in Stuttgart on November 10, selling for DM420,000 (£134,000).

GERMANY: Joseph Beuys’ Sonnenkreuz (1947-48), a patinated bronze sculpture 15 x 81/4in (37 x 21cm), evoking a crucifix against a radiating sun, sold comfortably over estimate for DM200,000 (£64,000) at the Lempertz Contemporary Art sale in Cologne on December 5.

GERMANY: TYPEWRITERS may not be renowned for their beauty but there was undeniable aesthetic charm, as well as historic significance, to the 1867 Malling Hansen Writing Ball that set a new world record price for an historical typewriter with a double-estimate DM150,000 (£48,000) for Auction Team Köln in Cologne on December 1.

THE Midlands branch of Bonhams is the clearing house for all sewing pieces offered to the empire’s rooms and showed its worth at this specialist sale on 13 December.