News

UK: OFFERED at Phillips on March 30 was the former Houghton copy of the 1590 first edition of The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

Eugène Gayot’s Atlas statistique de la production des chevaux en France. Documents pour servir a l’histoire naturelle-agricolle des race de chevalliers du pays of 1850 contains 27 coloured maps and 31 litho plates of horses, mostly with two views.

US: A Japanese cloisonné enamel vase usurped an 18th century Chinese jade brushwasher – expected to be the star lot – to take pride of place in Sloan’s (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) Asian Ceramics and Works of Art sale on April 2, Washington DC.

US: THIS Khmer bronze group of the Mahayana trinity, depicting Muchalinda Buddha, Prajnaparamita and Avalokitesvara, c.13th century, 12in (30cm) high, was one of several entries purchased from Nagel in May 2000 by an American collector.

TWO men have been charged in the United States in a conspiracy to sell the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleu, signed by Napoleon and stolen in 1988 from the French National Archives in Paris.

UK: Art imitates life in many ways – few stranger than this 1950’s pottery model of a Shetland Pony.

UK: AS well as a quantity of letters, journals and sketch albums written or compiled by R.M. Ballantyne – among them an album containing sketches made on excursions to Scotland and fishing trips to Norway in the 1850s, which sold at £1000 to David Miles – the Bonhams (Buyer’s premium: 15/10 per cent) sale contained an 1858 first issue of Coral Island, the publisher’s decorative blue cloth binding slightly worn but generally good, which made £4000 (Heritage).