Auctioneers

Sotheby’s opened its September Asia Week auctions in New York on September 10 with the $8.3m sale of Chinese art consigned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Entered by a vendor who hated them, a pair of 6in (15.5cm) long 19th century nutcrackers reflected in their way two different aspects of auctioneering today: how smaller country firms see their future and what will happen to antique ivory items when most of the trade in them is banned.

A busier than usual summer for the local housing market appeared to boost both vendor consignments and bidding at Market Harborough auctioneers Gildings (18% buyer’s premium).

The second published work of the ‘flower book lady’ has no other auction appearance

Hindman Auctions will be selling a Midwestern collector’s ensemble of rare books in an 85 lot auction in Chicago on November 5.

A pocket globe with some areas still a mystery leads a maritime auction at Exeter saleroom Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood.

Pitched at £500-800, this grand sonnerie carriage clock came with little information for bidders at Jacobs & Hunt’s (22% buyer’s premium) sale in Liss other than plentiful illustrations and the name C Marcks & Co, Bombay and Poona engraved to the silvered dial.

Freeman’s enjoys a strong Scottish connection, embodied in the firm’s current chairman, Edinburgh-born Alasdair Nichol, whose accent has diluted not one jot in the 25 years he has lived and worked in the US.

A portrait of an unidentified young man by the 18th century French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) will feature in the auction to be held by Skinner in Boston on September 27.

Estimated at just £40-60, this ebonised wood and alabaster table casket sold to a bidder using thesaleroom.com for £1600 at Peter Francis (20% buyer’s premium) of Carmarthen on August 28.

A model example of trans-European trucking, this diecast van advertising a Swiss company was made in Italy and sold to a German buyer at the Runcorn rooms of British Toy Auctions (18% buyer’s premium).

A final selection of works from the London summer sale of books from the Fox Pointe Manor library* includes a gruesome account of London’s ‘Great Plague’.

A single-owner collection of 27 pieces of Martin Brothers art pottery will be included in the Design sale series to be held by Rago auctions in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Boosted by the ‘wrong therefore rare’ factor – so important in the world of collectables – a 1977 British quad film poster for the first Star Wars film took top billing in a 250-lot specialist sale at Ewbank’s (24% buyer’s premium).

In the US (the world’s single biggest art market) just like in the UK (the world’s second largest), positives have been taken from the much-documented changing focus of the international auction houses.

How very different London’s Euston station looks in this coloured aquatint from a copy of Thomas Talbot Bury’s 'Six Coloured Views on the London and Birmingham Railway'.

One of the star turns in the summer sale in South Cerney of Martin Orsky’s wonderful library emerged towards the end of the day. This was a uniformly framed set of five stencil coloured woodcut broadsides, heightened with bodycolour and glitter and representing ‘The Five Senses’, sold at £30,000.

Coinex, the British Numismatic Trade Association’s annual showpiece fair, returns on September 27-28.

It was while working as a studio assistant to Lord Leighton in the early 1860s that John Emms (1841-1912) travelled to Lyndhurst in the New Forest, a trip that would define his career as a painter of dog portraits and sporting scenes.