Auctioneers

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was an American artist whose oeuvre – paintings, murals and lithographs – was at the forefront of the Regionalist movement.

Undoubtedly the most evocative account of the workshop of the celebrated clockmaker Joseph Knibb comes from a letter written by the Restoration-era politician Richard Legh (1635-87) of Lyme Hall in Cheshire to his young wife, Elizabeth.

Sporting a torn and defective but rarely seen dust jacket, a 1911, first American printing of Gaston Leroux’s 'The Phantom of the Opera' sold for $10,000 (£7750) in a recent New York sale.

Eardley Norton, who is listed at 49 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell between 1762- 94, enjoyed a reputation as a skilled mechanic and the maker of complex timepieces, sometimes with musical and astronomical movements.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales at £1700 or under, including abstract-style embroidery by Frances Richards, the wife of Ceri Richards.

Early printed books, among them a Bible of 1476, were a notable feature of a recent West Sussex sale.

The series of Victorian carriage clocks by James McCabe – the son of a Belfast clockmaker of the same name who came to London in the 1770s and worked at the Royal Exchange from 1804 – are typically beautifully made with exemplary twin fusee striking movements.

On July 2 Sotheby’s will hold the first of a four-part series of sales to disperse an important collection of clocks and pocket watches.

Estimated at a token £100-200, a large twin fusee wall clock sold to an online bid of £2400 (plus premium) at Wessex Auction Rooms (17% buyer’s premium) in Chippenham.

A rare regulator bracket clock signed by Thomas Cole was among a fine selection of English 18th and 19th century horology offered by Hutchinson-Scott (20% buyer’s premium) in Skipton, North Yorkshire, on May 23.

During an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic in 1996, a marine chronometer made by JW Ray, Liverpool, was recovered and brought ashore.

Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917-2009), one of America’s best-known artists of the mid-20th century, focused on provincial landscapes and the people in them.

This 1880s Haida painted wood raven rattle, 12¾in (32cm) high, has a provenance to the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society and the collection of the late Johnson S Bogart, San Francisco.

London’s horse dealers, auctioneers and cab-yards are among the most memorable subjects painted by Camden Town Group founder Robert Bevan (1865-1925) during the early 20th century.

This silver-gilt Doncaster Cup racing trophy has hallmarks for Daniel Smith and Robert Sharp for 1767.

These two mahogany library mantel timepieces – for sale at Dreweatts of Donnington Priory in the autumn – were supplied to HM Government by Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy in the early days of Victoria’s reign.

The complex precision electromechanical pendulum clocks made by William Hamilton-Shortt, engineer for the London & South Western Railway, and Frank Hope Jones, horologist of the Synchronome Company, were the most accurate pendulum clocks ever commercially produced.

A Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of May 30 ran to well over 540 lots in all, but it was very early in proceedings that a much, much higher than predicted bid of £26,000 was made on an 1853, presentation first of 'Palm Trees of the Amazon and their uses.