Auctioneers

Australia gains three new auction houses as specialists go it alone in Melbourne

A rare medieval gold head of a saint generated significant interest at a sale in Paris conducted by Pierre Bergé & Associés at the Hôtel Drouot.

An Edwardian Carlton House satinwood desk of the type which was once a best-seller at auction, but an early casualty of the furniture slump, was back in favour at the Hartleys (17.5% buyer’s premium) summer sale in Ilkley.

From the same source which provided Sotheby’s success with a fine collection of Scottish Colourist works (ATG No 2347), a large late 19th version of the Medici Vase led the two-day Glasgow sale at Great Western Auctions (23% buyer’s premium).

Running to just over a hundred pages and containing numerous illustrations of ships, figureheads and portrait busts, an accounts ledger kept by a Cumbrian shipbuilder has gone to a local museum.

The Paris high season is a time when classic sales of traditional fare are as much to the fore as buoyant sectors such as Asian, contemporary and modern and tribal art.

The latest batch of period portraits to pass through Cheffins featured several from a late-16th century property in Great Chesterford, Essex. Passed by descent, the quartet was led by an attractive English School portrait of Queen Mary I (1516-58), an oil painted on an oval 2ft x 21in (62 x 53cm) canvas.

The Meissen model of Count Bruhl’s Tailor was a major attraction at Hampshire auction house Jacobs & Hunt (26% buyer’s premium).

British watercolours depicting the beautiful county of Devon and painted during the medium’s golden age drew eager bidding at Cheffins of Cambridge (22.5% buyer’s premium).

Bids of £100 and upwards bought bidders a history of the English hearth and home among the Crowther lots at Cheffins on June 13-14, where 80% of the lower-priced items went to private buyers.

A pocket watch worn by Lord Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar and probably given to him after his triumph at the Battle of the Nile is to be offered at auction next month.

Pitched at £100-150, a small North American Native woven pouch attracted interest from London, Continental and US specialists at Tennants’ (23% buyer’s premium) Militaria & Ethnographica offering at Leyburn.

It was catalogued as 19th century, with a replaced plate, later back batons, small chips and wear, age cracks and the gilt painted surface was thick and not original.

Some 240 lots in a recent two-day book sale in Norfolk came from the library of local authors and collectors David and Patricia Cory, with science fiction, fantasy, ghost stories and crime fiction very much in evidence.