Auctioneers

Collection amassed by Christie’s veteran Hugo Morley-Fletcher includes ‘special group’ of porcelain

Paul Nash, looking back at the 1924-25 period when he taught design at the Royal College of Art, said: “I was fortunate in being there during an outbreak of talent and can remember at least eight men and women who have made names for themselves since then in a variety of different directions.”

One of perhaps only two known ruby red versions of the Whitefriars Banjo vase sold for £17,200 in Devon on April 9.

A tribal art sale held by Lempertz (26/20% buyer’s premium) in Brussels earlier this year was led by an exceptional nkisi nkondi figure. Guided at €70,000-80,000, it hammered at €320,000 (£264,500).

Book was published by champion of Swiss Calvinism four years before he became a Protestant martyr

Created shortly after the 1830 Revolution, when Louis Philippe ruled as ‘king of the French’, the ‘Service de la Chevalerie’ was a great example of romantic historicism.

The Art Deco design movement found a unique expression in Cotswolds School furniture - one that sought to blend clean lines with traditional English materials and craftsmanship.

Aesthetic Movement designers and artists were in thrall to the peacock and its extravagant plumage.

One of the highest prices for a figurative work by Maxwell Ashby Armfield (1881-1972) came at an early spring sale at Plymouth Auction Rooms (20% buyer’s premium).

Held by the same Dutch family for just over 300 years, a very high-grade Elizabeth I gold Sovereign sold for £75,000 at London coin specialist Sovereign Rarities’ auction on March 13.

These two silver lots bear the mark of Henry George Murphy (1884-1939), whose Falcon Studio produced some of the finest English silver of the inter-war era.

Only a decade ago Carlton Ware designer Violet Elmer (1907-88) was a relative unknown compared with her contemporaries Clarice Cliff, Susie Cooper and Charlotte Rhead.

Among the earliest examples of Australian gold rush jewellery are the simple signet rings sold to miners in the settlement of Ballarat in the 1850s as a memento of the boomtown days.

The London-based design company Isokon, which produced furniture by Wells Coates and Marcel Breuer, and Gerald Summers’ firm Makers of Simple Furniture both explored the radical possibilities of lamination.

As the Depression took hold, the clamour for luxury goods in tropical hardwoods, silver and shagreen was replaced by a demand for less expensive consumer goods that combined the modern aesthetic with new materials and industrial production.

Shelley produced the geometric Vogue and Mode shape tea and coffee wares between 1930-32 - both the designs of Eric Slater (1902-84) who had worked at the factory since the end of the First World War.