Auctioneers

CHRISTIE'S are to increase their buyer’s premium. With effect from January 1, 2005, the current 19.5 per cent premium which is charged on the first £70,000/$100,000/€110,000 will increase by 0.5 per cent to 20 per cent at almost all Christie’s sites.

A novelty locomotive sweet container for Chlorodyne Lozenges (probably some form of cough drop) proved a star attraction at Richard Winterton’s December 1 collectors’ auction in Burton on Trent last week.

A HANDFUL of factors make this Coxon Aerial fishing reel among the best of its type.

ESTABLISHING a new landmark for any work of art sold at auction outside London, a family portrait by Francis Hayman (1708-1776) took £540,000 at John Nicholson’s Fernhurst salerooms last week.

THE Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a devotional panel of the Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278; died 1319) from the Stoclet family in Brussels.

NOTTINGHAM auctioneers Neales have become the latest business to join the Fine Art Auction Group, parent company of the Dreweatt Neate Fine Art group of regional auctioneers.

A NEW auction house has opened in London’s West End focusing on Russian art, one of the fastest growing sectors of the world art market.

WHEN it comes to Beatrix Potter, they don’t come rarer than this previously unrecorded first trade edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

CHRISTIE'S have announced that discussions with the National Trust for Scotland concerning a private sale of Dumfries House and its contents have ended.

IN September 1878, as it became clear that the Newbury Borough Fire Brigade was suffering from a lack of men and equipment, around 20 determined tradesmen decided to take matters into their own hands and to form a volunteer fire brigade. After some debate by the town’s Watch Committee, the auxiliary brigade won a majority approval.

THE market for Contemporary art maintained its seemingly unstoppable momentum in New York last week.

THE international Asian art community descended on London from November 4-12 to battle for the best quality Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Southeast Asian material the major houses and dealers could muster during Asian Art in London.

THE Bourne casket, a Restoration needlework casket that failed to sell when offered by Netherhampton Salerooms earlier this year, has been sold by private treaty to the Lancashire Museum Services.

AUCTION revenues have leapt by nearly a half, year on year, for the third quarter of 2004 at Sotheby’s. But increased costs have meant that they have also registered a slightly bigger loss.

NERVES in New York’s art market, just like those in the New York stock market, were settled by the swift resolution of the US presidential election.

IN the competitive world of domestic tablewares, the name of Spode has remained among the very best since production started c.1770.

BACK in April in Antiques Trade Gazette No 1633, we pictured and discussed an unusual Derby porter mug decorated with industrial scenes of two Mancunian foundries which sold at Bonhams in London for £3800.

THE current fashionable status of antiquities and the charm of animal subject matter proved an irresistible combination for collectors last week when Christie’s offered the late Leo Mildenberg’s collection of ancient animals. The two-day dispersal of the German-born collector’s Noah’s ark, in London on October 26 and 27, totalled just over £3m.

THE highlight of a Gerald and Sheila Goldberg collection of predominately Irish decorative arts sold by Mealy’s in Douglas, Cork earlier this month was this finely-preserved Aubusson tapestry, right, designed by Louis le Brocquy (b.1916).

SHALL I be mother? At first glance there’s nothing very exciting at all about this Edwardian teapot. Decorated with printed, painted and aerographed flower sprays against a graduated green and yellow ground and highlighted by burnished gilt, it is typical of the cheap and cheerful earthenwares churned out in their thousands in Staffordshire at the turn of the last century.