Auctioneers

The Flemish post-Impressionist Emile Claus (1849-1924) embraced the prevailing taste for plein-air painting when he moved to the village of Astene by the river Lys in 1883.

This poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps is one of the rarer entries in Heritage Auctions’ July 27-28 sale of posters to be held in Dallas.

A cache of military diving watches sold in Hampshire and a £125,000 Daytona spotlight the thriving market for vintage mechanical ‘tool’ watches.

This pair of green stained ivory cufflinks offered by Dreweatts (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) of Donnington Priory was made by Child & Child after a design by the eminent Pre-Raphaelite painter and jewellery designer Edward Burne-Jones.

A collection of diamond jewellery attracted international competition at Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (19.5% buyer’s premium) June sale in Taunton. The cache of pre-war jewels was consigned following a house call by gemmologist and valuer Richard Slater. “It was a wonderful selection of jewellery. The owner had great taste,” he said.

A medal, silver cigar box and ‘oil lamp’ lighter sold at Ramsay Cornish's latest sale in Edinburgh had come by descent from Major Jonathan Leslie Dean (1859-1926). He was a key participant in the defence of O’okiep (1902), the small town in the Northern Cape that was besieged by Boer Commandos from April 4-May 4, 1902, towards the end of the Second Boer War.

The marathon 12-hour 'Maharajas & Mughal Magnificence' auction of jewellery and works of art from the Al Thani family held in New York last month was a once-in-a-generation event.

A recent sale at Dix Noonan Webb (20% buyer’s premium) included a private collection of antique jewels, gold and enamelled boxes and pocket watches.

This rare American scene by noted railway painter Terence Cuneo (1907-96) turned up at Canterbury Auction Galleries (20% buyer’s premium) in Kent.

Associations including Queen Victoria’s daughter help to boost 17th century manuscript.

MADAM – I am delighted to be able to reassure your reader Geoffrey Hobson (Letters, ATG No 2398) that indeed the facilities he discovered in a US auction house are already in use in our auction room and others in the UK (Ewbank’s, Forum and Stanley Gibbons to name a few).

A 17th century oak panel marking the rebuilding of one of the best-known dwellings on the Chester Rows sold at auction last week for £4600.

Anglicised, Anglican and Tory landowners controlled many aspects of Welsh life in the Georgian period – particularly when it came to politics.

No record exists of any signed, autograph letter in the hand of Mao Zedong being previously sold on the international market, said Sotheby’s (25/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) of the example it offered as part of a June 11 sale of manuscripts, Continental books and music.

On January 4, 1940, the London subsidiary of the Omega Watch Co received an urgent order from the Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Company for 2000 watches intended for Royal Air Force crews. Delivery was to be made by March 10, 1940.

Top lot in a June 6 sale of maps, natural history and other colour plate books held in New York was a rare map by Lewis Evans of what were then still the ‘Middle British Colonies’ in America.

Beneath the famous anchor and dolphin device that denotes a product of the Aldine presses in Venice, the final leaf of a 1516 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses below bears an inscription that reveals the reason this little work in its later vellum binding sold at £6000.

The Hammerhead shark plate shown below is not as colourful as many of the other 432 featured in a generally fine and complete copy of Marcus Elieser Bloch’s Ichthyologie… sold recently, but certainly one of the more eye-catching.

Italian sculptors were the hottest property as garden statuary flourished at summer sales in the Home Counties.