Auctioneers

PHILLIPS, de Pury & Luxembourg have closed their French and Continental Furniture department with the departure of its head, Thierry Millerand.

A US federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of former Sotheby’s chairman A. Alfred Taubman who had been found guilty of conspiring with rival auctioneer Christie’s International to fix commission fees.

USA: A stage designer for the Ballets Russes, advertising artist, painter and book illustrator, Alexander Alexeieff, is probably best known for his animated cartoons, but in two posters that he designed for LNER he produced surreal images that were unlike anything previously seen on a train poster.

USA: Next week in an extraordinary single-lot auction – and the first joint sale between Sotheby’s.com and eBay, this 1933 Double Eagle $20 gold coin is to be offered for sale by Sotheby’s and New York coin auctioneer Stack’s on behalf of the US government.

USA: The works of two American impressionists, Fern Isabel Coppedge (1888-1951) and Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927), both of whom were plein air painters whose works were admired for their fresh and colourful imagery, are featured here, together with a sample of the folksier treatment of rural America by Paul Seifert, a German fruit and vegetable farmer who took to painting as a lucrative sideline.

USA: THREE pieces of Tiffany art glass and a Tiffany-type lamp from the Handel factory – sold by Doyles of New York on June 5 and by Skinners of Boston on June 22 – are featured here.

This rare 9in (23cm) diameter Venetian lattimo glass plate of c.1741, with iron red decoration of the Piazetta at Venice led Bonhams’ May 22 Continental ceramics sale when it was bid to £36,000.

Certainly the most expensive Coronelli globe ever sold, and quite possibly the costliest single globe of any kind at auction*, this 3ft 61/2in (1.08m) diameter terrestrial globe of 1688 was sold for £210,000 to a collector as part of a July 10 Cartography sale held by Christie’s.

English ceramics may have been the junior partner to their Continental cousins in lot terms at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on June 27, making up just 81 of the 230 lots, but they provided the two highest prices.

“Full of fire and and zealous faculty breaking its way through all conventionalism to such truth as it can conceive” – thus was the forthright opinion of John Ruskin on seeing George Tinworth’s collection of eight terracotta panels of biblical scenes at the 1875 Royal Academy Exhibition.

Specialist items, including a collection of five nut crackers and novelty silver entries, encouraged buyers to travel to Herefordshire to bid in this 1080-lot sale at Brightwells on 11 June, which was 70 per cent sold by lot.

English blue and white pottery may not be the most fashionable ceramic collecting area, but the 144-lot Patricia Davis collection offered in the June 11 morning session at Sworders Essex rooms suffered only 22 casualties.

SINCE the 1920s, Shell have commissioned paintings from key British artists for Shell county guides, calendars and school wall charts. In order to raise funds to create a new exhibition space in the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu for the earlier works from the company’s collection, Shell decided to sell 193 lots dating from 1950-1990, most of which had never been seen in public before, at Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5% buyer’s premium) on July 4.

THE first industry-wide survey of the secondhand jewellery market puts the value of trade at several hundred million pounds a year.

After 236 years of auctioning wine in London and other international centres, Christie’s will be holding their inaugural sale of fine wines in Paris on September 14.

UK: KNIGHT Frank, who are overseeing negotiations for the sale of Sotheby’s Billingshurt rooms, have set a deadline for interested parties of July 26.

In the portrait miniature market the sitter is considered less important than the painter – but sometimes even a famous artist like Henry Bone, enamellist to the Prince Regent and the author of this miniature, right, can be superseded by their subject.

Although billed as English and Continental furniture, and Works of Art Bonhams’ (17.5/10 % buyer’s premium) sale on June 11 was very much slated towards the home market, with English fare accounting for around 100 of the 153 lots.

The extent to which a provincial auctioneer should be liable for underselling a work of art is again under scrutiny as a vendor threatens legal action.

History was made at Sotheby’s July 10 Old Master Paintings sale when Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ long-lost masterpiece, The Massacre of the Innocents, sold in the room to the Mayfair-based book dealer Sam Fogg for £45m, the highest auction price ever achieved for a work of art in the UK.