Auctioneers

After almost 150 years as chattels auctioneers, Bruton Knowles have sold their art and antiques division to former department head Simon Chorley.

The fourth annual ATG-sponsored football match between the Dealers and the Auctioneers will take place at the Bank of England sports ground in Roehampton on Friday, September 1.

FRIENDS, relatives and colleagues have been shocked by the death of Richard Allen, former Director of Halls fine art auctioneers of Shropshire, in a road accident last Thursday. The tragedy occurred as Mr Allen was returning from a viewing.

The power of one major collection to transform an auction company’s figures was dramatically shown this month when Christie’s France announced sales figures of €122.8m (including premiums) for the first half of 2006.

M1, one of the most sought-after UK registration numbers, set a new world record price for a car number plate when it sold for £300,000 at Bonhams’ Goodwood Festival of Speed sale of Sports, Competition and Collectors’ Motor Cars and Automobilia on July 7.

Enigmatic, elusive, rarely seen, and classified as mad – but that’s our Dadd!

OF the many publications generated by Captain Cook’s exploits in the Pacific, the most curious is surely A Catalogue of the Different Specimens of Cloth Collected in the Three Voyages of Captain Cook to the Southern Hemisphere...

Christie’s took a major step into the world of virtual auctioneering last week with the launch of Christie’sLIVE, a real-time online bidding facility which they are to roll out over the next six months.

IT set a British auction record for a Shakespeare First Folio and made the highest price ever seen for a printed book at Sotheby’s London (20/12% buyer’s premium) – but hushed voices at the back of the saleroom were suggesting that the £2.5m hammer price represented pretty good value for a near-perfect copy of the most important book in English literature.

IN what must be one of the least surprising private treaty sales negotiated, The Martin Luther King Jr Collection will go to Morehouse College, Dr King's alma mater in his home city of Atlanta.

An early 19th century boxwood and bone Napoleonic prisoner-of-war model of the Third Rate 74-gun HMS Mars fired a shot across the bows at Hampton & Littlewood's (15% buyer's premium) Maritime Sale in Exeter on June 21 when it set a new house record of £60,000.

There was nothing dull or predictable about the coin sale at Spink on June 29 when an expectant crowd gathered to witness the sale of one of the rarest of English Medieval coins: the gold Double Leopard florin of Edward III which was minted for only a few months in 1344.

A COURT ruling means new Venice auction house San Marco can proceed with their July 8-9 sale - but only under strict conditions.

More suited to the wall than the bed and more a piece of social history than a functional textile, this 19th century appliqué felt coverlet reaped the rewards when it sold for £24,000 (plus premium) at Kerry Taylor auctions in association with Sotheby's on June 26.

Record turnover at London flagship sales but the buzz of the 1980s has gone

Compiled in the second half of the 15th century, the Fechtbuch of Hans Talhoffer (fl. 1435-82), the most celebrated and experienced fighting-master of the age, is a veritable encyclopaedia of medieval combat.

Given today’s obsession with celebrity, especially Royal celebrity, it was always on the cards that Christie’s sale last week of Princess Margaret’s jewellery, silver and other personal belongings was going to make much more than the £2m-3m predicted.

Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton was one of the most notorious British commanders of the American Revolution. After leading a series of successful operations in both the north and south, he returned home after the war as one of the most famous men in England, sat for a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and began a long-term affair with actress and royal consort Mary Robinson.

Italy has witnessed a sudden, perhaps unexpected, surge in its auction scene with a series of record-breaking sales at Sotheby’s, the most remarkable of which has been the Milan sale of a cycle of Tiepolo canvases on May 30.

Before The Great War the Lincoln engineering company, William Foster and Co, was synonymous with the very best threshing machines. By 1918, managing director Sir William Tritton, together with Major W.G. Wilson, had been credited by the Royal Commission as the inventor of an armoured fighting vehicle forever known as the tank.