Auctioneers

Before British female nurses could even help with the wounded they faced a battle to be accepted, as the story behind a medal winner reveals.

“Something awful. Never witnessed anything like it before. After a bombardment of a week the Germans mounted their own trenches and the infantry reckon that every German had a machine gun…”

From relatively modest beginnings, specialist design sales have become mainstream money-spinners at provincial auctions.

It was scenes of pleasure boats at Lytham St Anne’s on the Lancashire coast like the one shown below that Lowry’s mother supposedly favoured over her son’s darker industrial scenes.

This finely modelled Hellenistic white marble figure of Aphrodite sold for £60,000 (plus 24% buyer’s premium) at Dominic Winter in South Cerney on March 5. Bidding opened at £30,000, twice the low estimate, before bids were exchanged between the internet and the phones.

Arts & Crafts enthusiasts who hoped to buy a pair of Voysey chairs at something close to their £20-40 estimate at an auction in the Cotswolds were to be disappointed.

A spectacular competition came at Woolley & Wallis’ latest picture sale as 12 bidders pursued a pair of Italian Old Masters which the auction house had spotted tucked away in a dark corner of the vendor’s top landing.

As the Standard Catalogue of British Coins points out, this tiny denomination, the George VI silver threepence dated 1945 , essentially marks the end of the silver coinage and the beginning of modern coins made of copper-nickel and brass.

Shown below is a plate from A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates… sold at Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s premium) on February 19

First auction to be held in Freeman’s new Philadelphia site topped by Degas and Van Gogh

An historic archive belonging to the engineer who oversaw the design of the Mulberry Harbours in the Second World War comes to auction in Cumbria later this month.

This set of table and chairs by the ever-popular Mouseman had been bought from the Kilburn workshops in the 1970s by the vendor’s parents.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales including an Edith Lawrence linocut.