Bonhams

OUT of the ashes of Glendinings, Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) have established a series of general sales. The last occurred on April 5. John Millensted, who has worked at Glendinings for some years, has been promoted to head of the numismatic department.

In 2001 international connoisseurial interest and commercial hype accompanied a major exhibition and accompanying book on the Belgian ceramicist Charles Catteau (1880-1966). There are signs that the market is now beginning to mature – minor Boch Frères works by Catteau were very soft at Bonhams in London on March 1 – but Brussels auctioneers Horta were able to offer a major signed studio piece by the artist on March 21-22.

If a silhouette was going to set a new auction record then this elaborately embellished, highly decorative and grandiose royal subject was surely a good candidate. When it sold for £9500 (plus 20 per cent premium) at Bonhams on February 22, it beat the auctioneers’ own previous auction high of £8000 set last year by a Torond conversation piece.

Pot Lids and Stevengraphs were two areas of the market put to the test last month.

Bonhams are expanding their existing New York presence by taking gallery space at the Fuller Building, 595 Madison Ave. The new space will enable Bonhams to hold regular sales in New York beginning in the summer.

ATG have an update on the round-up of provincial sale totals for 2004 published in issue 1672, January 15.

Two of the strongest performances in the December ceramics sales came from the glass sections offered at Bonhams Bond Street on December 8 and at Sotheby’s Olympia two weeks later.

IN CONTRAST to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, who usually offer Japanese arms and armour in Japanese works of art sales, Bonhams (19.5/10% buyers premium) include theirs as a section in militaria auctions.

PRINTED ephemera, often disregarded detritus, is not generally highly valued material. But should it chance to survive, it can acquire socio-historical and even monetary value.

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.

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.

A STUNNING early Ming dynasty dish has equalled the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of Chinese porcelain.

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.

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.

TWO or three times a year Bonhams (19.5/10% buyer's premium) offer a selection of modern pieces in their monthly Knightsbridge silver and objects of vertu sales. Undoubtedly a growth area of the market, works by major names such as Stuart Devlin, Gerald Benney and Christopher Lawrence routinely feature amongst the top ten lots.

FURNITURE in Bonhams' (17.5/10% buyer's premium) Par sale on September 2 was given a considerable boost by a contingent of Irish dealers who between them secured around 20 of the more standard entries in the 104-lot section.

BONHAMS have named two of their most senior specialists as joint deputy chairmen of the company.

JOHN Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness of 1810, the first book-length account of a single psychiatric case and a classic of the early literature in this field, was inspired by the case of James Tilly Matthews, a London tea merchant who undertook a self-styled peace mission between France and England in 1793.

PEWTER always forms the first section of Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer's premium) oak sales at Chester, and on September 9 enthusiasts, mainly collectors, were there as usual. Most had their eyes on the obvious star offering, the fine Charles II wriggle-work tankard, top right.

ONE of 11, generally very fine, British drinking glasses consigned from ‘a Highland lady’ to The Scottish Sale held by Bonhams (17.5% buyer's premium) in Edinburgh on August 18-20, was this 3 1/4in (8cm) high polychromed enamel firing glass, right, probably decorated c.1765 by member of the Beilby family of Newcastle.