Auctioneers

IN CONTRAST to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, who usually offer Japanese arms and armour in Japanese works of art sales, Bonhams (19.5/10% buyers premium) include theirs as a section in militaria auctions.

ANDREW McIntosh Patrick, director of The Fine Art Society, is to sell his celebrated collection of metalwork by the Victorian industrial designer Christopher Dresser. Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull will conduct the projected £400,000 sale on April 19.

There is a mistake in the Sotheby's Furniture and Interior Decorator sale advertisement in the 8th January issue of the Antiques Trade Gazette (No. 1671). The sale and view is being held at Olympia and not New Bond Street as stated.

A Christie’s South Kensington sports sale of November 23 saw a bid of £5500 on a programme for the 1897 F.A. Cup Final at Crystal Palace in which Aston Villa completed a League and Cup double by beating Everton 3-2.

Containing several hundred pencil drawings, a Spanish chemistry textbook used by Salvador Dali during his student days at the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid was sold for $12,000 (£6280) in a Sotheby’s New York sale of December 3.

Executed in the 1890s, when Beatrix Potter was working for the greetings card firm Hildesheimer, this little ink and watercolour drawing was last seen at auction in London about ten year ago, but on December 1 it came back to Christie’s South Kensington and sold for £25,000.

THE wrappers are torn and creased, the spine has been repaired with glue and several plates and text leaves are loose, but the book seen right is an 1858 first edition of perhaps the scarcest of all American fishing books, Fishing with Hook and Line... by ‘Frank Forester’, the pseudonym used by that prolific chronicler of hunting, shooting and fishing, Henry William Herbert.

“In 20 years I have never seen anything quite like it,” says auctioneer Richard Bromell of Sherborne’s Charterhouse. “It has a central dial for Greenwich which is surrounded by 11 smaller dials telling the time in the various countries. Having originally been presented to a Victorian relative [of the vendors] who built railways for a living, he would have been able to keep track of time with all his business interests.”

HIGHLIGHT of the 1440-lot Asian section of Nagel’s (33% buyer’s premium) mammoth November sale series was this rare 11in (28cm) high cylindrical cloisonné enamel vase of c.1900 by the highly regarded Namikawa Yasuyuki decorated with a striking design of bamboo and a snail on a black ground.

A militaria section at Lawrences’ (15% buyer's premium) October 28-19 sale featured a quality, privately entered, 12-lot cache of weapons which suffered not one casualty and racked up a £30,000 total.

OVER half of ArtCurial’s sale on December 8 was devoted to the Paris Design firm XO, founded in 1985.

KNOWN as Twelve Months of Flowers, a famous set of plates engraved by Henry Fletcher after original floral paintings by Pieter Casteels was originally produced as a sumptuously illustrated nursery catalogue of some 400 different species of flowers.

A more academic ivory carving than anything at Kidson-Trigg’s sale was this unsigned but fine quality 6 3/4in (17.5cm) portrait bust, right, offered at the Banbury rooms of Holloways (15% buyer’s premium) on November 30.

The continuing strength of the privately-fuelled market for unusual or quality toys in good condition saw Wallis & Wallis of Lewes boast healthy selling rates by volume in their specialist November and October toy sales.

A December 7 sale of incunabula conducted by Christie’s South Kensington saw a collector’s bid of £10,000 on a first edition of Johannes Nider’s Consolatorium..., a discussion of conscience that is based in large part on the teachings of St. Augustine, Gregory the Great and other medieval writers.

Wotton Auction Rooms Wotton-under-Edge October 19-20 Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent THIS wide-ranging, 1600-lot Gloucestershire sale was helped by a large number of probate estates which furnished proceedings with the type of reasonably estimated material sought after by dealers and collectors alike.

ON November 12 Christie’s (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) sold a European private collection of Pre-Columbian works of art amassed between the late 1960s and 1980. The market responded enthusiastically to fresh material of high quality with distinguished provenances. Although the lottage rate was only 73 per cent, by value, the sale came in at 93 per cent, a premium-inclusive total of $3.23m (£1.75m).

PRINTED ephemera, often disregarded detritus, is not generally highly valued material. But should it chance to survive, it can acquire socio-historical and even monetary value.

FIRST printed by Berthelet in 1531, Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named the Govenor, a treatise on the education of statesmen that was dedicated to Henry VIII and found great favour at court, has been described as “not only the earliest treatise on moral philosophy in English but the first of an imposing array which introduced into England the cultural and political ideals of the renaissance”.

Complete with its original bill of sale and warranty, this fine 18ct gold chronograph minute repeater pocket watch made by London maker J.W. Benson sold into the trade for £3100 at John Taylor’s (12% buyer’s premium) of Louth on December 7.