Auctioneers

The annual ski poster sale at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium), timed as usual to coincide with the winter sports season, jumped into action earlier this month. The auctioneers’ 273-lot offering on February 13 took in all the main long-established European resorts plus some from further afield, and attracted its usual crowd of aficionados in person or on the phone.

A Ptolemaic world map from the Nuremburg Chronicle was sold for £12,000 (£7500) as part of a December 12 sale of maps and prints held by Swann, while bid to $6000 (£3750) was the Map to illustrate Prince Maximilien of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America reproduced right.

Baldwin, Markov and M&M Numismatics is a bit of a mouthful, but this troika held their sale also in New York on January 16. It consisted mostly of classical coins. The antics of the Roman Circus would have given modern hunt protesters something to think about.

The now-defunct firm of Hedges & Butler (est.1667) was one of the oldest wine merchants in England, originally based by the Thames on a site now occupied by Charing Cross Station. The name of the company has now disappeared, but what its own publicity described as “our very interesting collection of old Viniana” provided an eye-catching highlight for Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) otherwise fairly routine mixed sale of art and antiques in Knowle.

If, as a recent opinion poll has suggested, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the greatest-ever Briton, and Mouton-Rothschild’s 1945 vintage is, as Michael Broadbent described it in his Great Vintage Wine Book, “a Churchill of a wine”, is Mouton-Rothschild ’45, ergo, the Greatest Ever Wine?

Inspired by the catacombs of Somerset House, the street lighting of Pall Mall and, above all, the Babylonian splendour of the new Houses of Parliament, artist John Martin’s 1841 oil on canvas Pandemonium was an apocalyptic vision of Victorian London that played well to the post-September 11 sensibilities of the US picture trade at Christie’s King Street sale of the Forbes collection on February 19-20.

When it comes to wall power there is nothing like a poster to add presence and focus to an interior, and for iconic or cult status, a film poster is hard to beat.

Decorative arts from 1870s Gothic Revival to 1960s Murano glass and everything in between is on offer at Sotheby’s Olympia this month. Their sizeable gathering of over 230 lots, which goes under the hammer on February 27, takes in examples of all the major design movements of the 20th century (and the latter end of the 19th): Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts, Wiener Werkstätte, Deco and Modernism.

SOTHEBY’S have announced that they have given up trying to find a buyer for the controlling stake of disgraced former chairman A. Alfred Taubman.

IF THERE is one objet d’art that best characterises the antiques market at present it is the curate’s egg – good in parts, but bad overall. The flawed ovum’s brighter regions encompass most low-value collectables – ceramics included.

PRIVATE pictures with reasonable estimates proved a recipe for success at Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on February 3 where 75 of the 101 lots found buyers at the £823,130 sale.

FOLLOWING the tragic death of John Ball in an accident last year, the future of his auction firm Heathcote Ball has been secured in a deal with Tennants.

SOTHEBY’S have started a new staff review and admit that further redundancies are likely.

The first furniture sale of the year at Sotheby’s Olympia (20/12% buyer’s premium) was a 272-lot gathering on January 14 which saw two-thirds of the contents change hands.

To date this year Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) have held five sales of furniture and carpets. These weekly sales are making a return to their Knightsbridge rooms for the first time in around 20 years after a recent peripatetic period of moving from Chelsea – their long time abode – to Bayswater and briefly back to Chelsea again.

The Bank of England Museum was the host and Spink were the auctioneers on Friday, January 24 at one of the most unusual sales seen in London. It was a sale of special number Bank of England notes sold to bolster the funds of the Commonwealth Education Fund.

BESWICK is one of the strongest areas of the 20th century collectable ceramics market so it was not surprising to see trade and private collectors packing these Leicestershire rooms at Gildings to bid on a large single-owner collection from a local deceased estate. What was surprising were the lengths to which bidders would go.

TIME waits for no man, the saying goes, and clients of Abraham-Louis Bréguet were certainly reminded of this fact when paying their monthly instalments to the Swiss-born watchmaker for Souscription pocket watches like this example right which featured at Woolley & Wallis’s sale on January 29.

It was a definite case of first the bad news, then the good news at the February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales in London. While Impressionist and Modern works failed to sparkle, there was a significant surge in interest for the Contemporary.

CHRISTIE’S have negotiated the sale of a major collection of watercolours of Greece by Edward Lear to the nation in lieu of tax. The 32 pictures come from the estate of the late Sir Steven Runciman and are expected to go the National Galleries of Scotland.