Auctioneers

Sotheby’s match Christie’s with 25% premium on lots sold below £10,000

JS Auctions are having to cease operations at their Cotefield Farm premises in Bodicote near Banbury.

DUBLIN auctioneers James Adam have negotiated a €3.5m (£2.4m) sale of remarkable papers setting a record for a single transaction of documents relating to the 1916 Easter Rising.

New York to hold liquor auctions

BOOMING art auctions and a massive growth in private sales have helped Sotheby’s to another set of record totals – this time for the first six months of 2007.

Maria Felix (1914-2002), born one of 16 children in the small Mexican town of Sonora, became an icon during the golden age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and was generally acknowledged as the most beautiful face in its history.

Bonhams have announced a major strengthening and enlargement of the ceramics department at their New Bond Street rooms with the immediate appointment of two former Sotheby’s specialists.

It was catalogued as Bow c.1760 but this English porcelain coffee cup seen at Bamfords of Derby on July 25 was identified as belonging to a much rarer class of porcelain associated with Charles Gouyn and a short-lived London concern in St James’s.

Half-yearly Paris figures to August showed Christie’s consolidating their lead with sales of €100.3m (£67.3m), nearly twice as much as their nearest rivals, ArtCurial.

This unusual 18th century bookstand or tray top commode, measuring 2ft 4in (71cm) wide, made a multiple-estimate £20,000 (plus 17.5 per cent buyer’s premium) at Dukes of Dorchester on July 26.

At any other sale the circumstances could have proved disastrous, but when the boat tent in the stewards’ enclosure in Henley-on-Thames flooded during The Henley Sale at Bonhams on July 21, things went swimmingly.

Sotheby’s are strongly opposing proposed legislation in New York that aims to outlaw the ‘chandelier’ bid.

Third threshold won’t hurt South Kensington says director

PHILLIPS de Pury look to have taken another step to increase their influence as a major player in London’s contemporary art market by forming a new partnership with The Saatchi Gallery.

This summer has seen a spate of sleepers awoken in provincial salerooms, but inevitably the one that grabbed the headlines in the national press was the tale of the rediscovered ‘Titian’.

Christie’s confirm new sale categories

This summer the annual staff-exhibition at Sotheby’s is entitled No Limits and includes 40 paintings, photographs, pieces of sculpture and jewellery by members of Sotheby’s staff.

In celebration of Fellows & Sons’ 130th anniversary, students and practising goldsmiths were invited by the Birmingham-based auctioneers to submit a design for a piece of utilitarian silver.

When the Dorchester Fine Art saleroom Duke’s sold two rediscovered panels of Dominican saints by Fra Angelico for £1.7m, it was one of the best documented events outside the London rooms accompanied by months of pre-sale media coverage.

One of the quirkier and more unusual offerings to feature in Christie’s £3.7m sale of English furniture and works of art on June 7 was this rare Elizabethan map fragment, one of the first tapestries ever produced in England.