Auctioneers

Is there a Christmas factor in the auction rooms? Cheffins auctioneer Jonathan Law (Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent) believes that the season may have some effect in putting a little pressure on people to buy rather than wait.

Christie’s King Street (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) were pulling out all the stops for their first full week of the month.

ANOTHER Greek author whom Aldus published was Aristotle, whose Opera Omnia appeared in a five-part, seven-volume edition between 1495 and 1498.

Halls (15% buyer’s premium) "It was quite a rare object, in good working order and sang beautifully.”

Richard Winterton (15% buyer’s premium)Trained by Tom Coulthwaite, who schooled a number of high-class jumpers in the first decades of the 20th century, Irish-bred Eremon was one of the top chasers of his era. And 1907 was very much his year.

SOLD at £42,000 to a collector in a November 30 sale of Continental books and manuscripts held by Sotheby’s was a 1566 Lyon edition of Celsus’ De re medica from the library of France’s ‘Prince of Poets’, Pierre de Ronsard. Autograph material by de Ronsard is of the utmost rarity, with just two documents entirely in his hand recorded (both in the Bibliothèque Nationale) and ony two or three volumes bearing his signature, as this one does, remaining in private hands.

MINDFUL of how demand at many sales is polarised between the ‘best and the rest’, Sotheby’s (20/12% buyer’s premium) decided to tackle this prevalent attitude head on with a new type of sale.

“Business has been good, but to achieve this I have had to work extremely hard.” This is how Chris Beetles summed up 2004 and, having already taken over £500,000 in sales from his renowned annual exhibition of British illustrators, he is ending the year on a bullish note.

With TEFAF Maastricht beckoning, it was hardly surprising that Dutch and Flemish painting should capture most of major prices at the December round of Old Master paintings sales in London.

The two best-selling pieces of furniture offered outside London in 2004 were sold during one of the very first and one of the last sales of the year.

Sotheby’s are to change the thresholds of their buyer’s premium structure from January 1, 2005.

FROM January 1, Bonhams will cut the paying out time for UK clients from 35 days to 21. Chairman Robert Brooks aims to cut the payment time further to 14 days and eventually to extend the policy worldwide.

Attracting some welcome national publicity for Swindon book specialists Dominic Winter (15% buyer’s premium) on November 11, was the remarkable performance of a group of early railway tickets consigned for sale by the widow of a Gloucestershire collector.

By Kate Hunt WHILE large dispersals of clocks have always been rarities outside of the major London rooms, the West Country is becoming a new spot on the dial. Like Bath-based Gardiner Houlgate (see last week’s ATG), the auctioneers formerly known as The Bristol Auction Galleries, who now operate under the Dreweatt Neate banner, have built a good private as well as a trade following for the triannual specialist clock sections included in their antique sales.

Paris auctioneer Jacques Tajan is severing his links with Tajan SA, the firm he founded in 1994, and setting up an art consultancy firm in Brussels, where he has already acquired 1000sqm premises near Avenue Louise.

Humberts, inc. Tayler & FletcherBourton-on-the-Water, October 26Buyer’s premium: 10 per cent

The small group of Sir Isaac Newton’s manuscripts and papers offered by Sotheby’s New York on December 3 were not for the most part concerned with the work that will forever ensure his fame – although an autograph draft of a letter concerning the presentation of six copies of the 1726, third edition of the Principia to the Académie Royale des Sciences sold at $28,000 (£14,560).

Breaking its own record as the most expensive piece of furniture ever sold at auction, this massive, 12ft 8in (3.86m) high, 18th century Florentine ebony, ormolu and pietra dura architectural display piece known as The Badminton Cabinet brought Christie’s December 9 sale of European furniture to a dramatic climax last week when it sold for £17m (£19,045,250 including premium).

Pick up a copy of a Beswick price guide from the late 1990s and it will tell you that the Galloway Bull, designed by Arthur Gredington, was made in three versions.

Troika is known for two distinctly different styles – the rough textured wares of which the Cycladic masks are now the most celebrated and the scarcer Brancusi-style smooth monochromatic glazed wares that reveal a rather different aesthetic.