Auctioneers

Bonhams’ (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) latest sale of 19th century pictures in London may have been small – running to just over 100 lots – but what it lacked in size it made up with the broad scope of its contents.

Sotheby’s has reported a 16% jump in sales to $6.4bn (£4.8bn) for 2018 – a reward for its focus on growing online and private sales. Profit, or adjusted net income, improved by 5.9% to $128.9m.

Two unusual and successful lots from a February 20 sale held by Lockdales (19.5% buyer’s premium) of Ipswich.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Among the 70-plus exhibitors attending the Textile Society’s annual Antique and Vintage Textiles Fair at the Armitage Centre in Manchester on Sunday, April 14, is fan specialist Mary Cooper.

The plethora of single-collection sales at the start of the year was not at the expense of old-fashioned auctions offering good-quality offerings across the range of dealing and collecting – such as the Winter Fine Arts sale at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) of Dorchester.

The sale at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (plus 21% buyer’s premium) on January 29 – an event dominated by the multi-estimate performance of a Qianlong mark vase in the Ming taste sold at £460,000 (see ATG No 2378) – also included a hardwood (probably olivewood), bone and mother-of-pearl inlaid model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

What seems to have been an overdue clear-out at Monmouth Trading Standards department led to half a dozen lots of imperial weights and measures being consigned to Stroud Auctions (18% buyer’s premium).

A small group of lots in a recent Edinburgh sale were once part of the library of the late 5th Earl of Lovelace at Torridon House.

Helped by conservatively pitched estimates, a clutch of middle-market Orientalist pictures achieved some modest growth in value on their first return to auction in three decades.

A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening… is the single volume that I have selected from a recent Gloucestershire auction in which job lots were very much in evidence and that acted as a sort of extra, clearing-the-decks sort of exercise in the saleroom’s calendar.

Precisely four months on from a flood inundating its saleroom, Carmarthen auction house Peter Francis (20% buyer’s premium) enjoyed a literal and metaphorical day in the sunshine on February 13.

This study (below) was one of 10 drawings by Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98) consigned by an unidentified charitable trust to Bonhams’ 19th Century European, Victorian and British Impressionist Art sale on February 20.

Regarded in their time as examples of the finest cabinet-making rather than simply reproductions, good 19th century French revivalist furniture remains in demand.

Sold for £900 by Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium) on February 19 was an elaborately bound example of Monsieur Gravelot’s Almanach Iconololgique… for the year 1771.

On April 9 Christie’s will be holding a Pre-Columbian sale featuring the 90-lot collection formed by Felix and Heidi Stoll from Basel as well as around 50 pieces from other vendors.

Illustrated with eight hand-coloured litho plates, each with moveable flaps, The Puppy’s Visit To His Friends was issued as one of EC Bennett’s moveable books, probably in the 1850s.

This early 18th century Louis XIV French table clock is part of a selection of 19 early European timekeepers that feature in Heritage Auctions’ fine and decorative arts sale in Dallas on March 8-10.

Two Victorian stained-glass and leaded window panels entered by the same vendor trebled the estimates in selling to the same UK online bidder at Special Auction Services (17.5% buyer’s premium) on February 5.

A very rare and inscribed example of CS Lewis’ first published work, a 1919 collection of verses previewed ATG No 2377, was sold recently in Oxford for £2800. Spirits in Bondage was part of the extensive book section of a January 30-31 sale at Mallams (23% buyer’s premium).