Auctioneers

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

It may be pretty quiet on the auction front in Europe but Down Under the saleroom and fairs scene is in full swing.

A unique Victoria Cross and other awards won by one of the greatest heroes in Canadian history is to be auctioned by Dix Noonan Webb on September 27.

This focus on furniture kicks off with a royal link and three more cheers at summer sales for the furniture market which a number of auctioneers are saying shows modest signs of recovery.

A 19th century painting depicting the death of Horatio Nelson soared to £21,500 at Lawrences (22% buyer’s premium) of Crewkerne on July 14.

An RAF logbook added value to a Second World War casualty group sold at Ipswich saleroom Lockdales (19.5% buyer’s premium) on July 15-16.

Medals for service in the Falklands, Northern Ireland and long service/good conduct denote a busy 1980s career. In value terms, for a non-special forces unit, it means a price probably within £1000 at auction. But it is a single action lasting about 17 minutes from start to finish which explains why such a group on offer at Woolley & Wallis on November 22 is estimated at £20,000-30,000.

Naïve-style paintings of livestock remain one of the liveliest sectors of the 19th century pictures market, judging by the response to several examples offered in Gloucestershire.

Sold for £400 on July 5 by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium), as part of an online sale of cricket books, was one of just 50 specially bound copies of The Catch: A Correspondence by Harold Pinter and Alan Wilkinson.

Personal and unique insights into warfare score highly at auction. So it proved at Cambridge firm Cheffins (22.5% buyer’s premium) in The Connoisseurs Sale on July 6, when a journal revealing the private thoughts of a Second World War fighter ace credited with more enemy ‘kills’ than any other British pilot doubled the top estimate to sell for £16,000.

Back in December 1962, a Yorkshire show promoter booked a new Liverpool band to play at Harrogate’s Royal Hall on the strength of their first record which had charted at No 17 a couple of months earlier.

Medals and orders can be heavy things. So what better way to carry around your various hard-earned gongs than a one-size-fits-all miniature version of them all?

Operations behind enemy lines was the theme linking two special forces medals groups sold by London auction house Spink (20% buyer’s premium) on July 26.

London dealership Marchant is to sell Chinese artworks at a dedicated auction in New York.

Considering there were only 150 men defending Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus, an impressive number of medals awarded after that epic 1879 encounter have come to auction recently.

Chiswick Auctions is to open its South Kensington showroom manned by a group of former Christie’s staff early next month.

The highlight of Lyon & Turnbull’s sale of Scottish Silver & Applied Arts on August 16 was a Jacobite drinking glass with a difference.

In the days when loved ones in the armed forces would head abroad on service for up to several years, not knowing when or if they would return, ‘sweetheart’ brooches were a way of remembering them.

The British Museum’s big summer exhibition on Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai is over, but more art from the Land of the Rising Sun is in the offing (also see International Events, ATG No 2305).

A large oil painting offered at auction for first time depicts notorious figure from Charles II’s court and sells for five times top estimate.