Auctioneers

Testament to a vibrant market for vintage Tudor wristwatches, a very scarce Oysterdate – the reference 7031 or ‘Homeplate’ – proved the star of Hansons’ Christmas auction at Bishton Hall, Staffordshire.

A fine example of a dirk, without which no Highland formal dresswear is complete, was among the stand-out lots at Cuttlestones’ (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale at Penkridge on November 22.

Three-day auction at Cumbrian saleroom demonstrates global reach of art and antiques.

Two pieces with imperial connections took the top honours during the November 5-23 sale at Hermann Historica (25% buyer’s premium) in Munich.

One of the more unusual corkscrews to come onto what is a fiercely competitive collectors’ market recently was a brass, steel and wooden contraption of the type one may have seen clamped to the bar of fin-de-siècle brasseries.

While £90,000 is an awful lot of money for an empty metal box, this old black painted and gold lettered deed box does bear the magic name of Winston Churchill.

This unfinished oil sketch of a tree was kept by pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) until his death and sold in his last major studio sale, held in 1926 at Christie’s.

Topping the results list at a recent sale at Grisebach (30/25/20% buyer’s premium) in Berlin was a work by the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that was created on island in the Baltic.

Did the final days of 2018 provide the year’s greatest discovery? Bidders who pursued a bronze dragon head from €20,000 to €2.4m (£2.2m) at the Drouot in Paris on December 17 certainly thought so.

“Every specialist has an object that they dream of having in their sales,” says Matthew Rubinger, Christie’s head of handbags and accessories. “For me, it’s the aluminium Explorer trunk by Louis Vuitton. The market is full of silver-coloured metal trunks, but this piece is their inspiration.”

A new auction record for the idiosyncratic stonewares of the Martin brothers was established at Phillips’ Design sale in New York.

Estimated at £40-60, this unusual Chinese scholar’s object took £32,000 (plus buyer’s premium) at a recent auction at Rogers Jones in Cardiff.