Auctioneers

A double-sided drawing by Alberto Giacometti of his classic elongated head and figure designs has been sold at auction in Cambridge for £130,000.

Thomson Roddick has been running auctions across Scotland for more than 130 years but is now planning to expand its operations in the Borders.

Last week’s first report on the fine travel library of John and Suzanne Bonham at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) focused on the Middle East, India, Central Asia and the Far East. This second selection begins with an African discovery and ends at the South Pole.

Pictures, prints and taxidermic displays accounted for the larger part of the Ornithology Sale held by Keys (17.5% buyer’s premium) on September 22, but it also offered some 175 book lots, many of them multiples.

During his nights spent ‘fire-spotting’ for flying bombs during the Blitz, it is said the artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare (1888-1956) would while away the hours filling sketchbooks.

Sold for £1100 by Chiswick Auctions (23% buyer’s premium) on September 27 was a copy of the posthumously published, 1633 first of Henry Briggs’ Trigonometria britannica….

Children’s books sold at Forum included a couple of appealing Beatrix Potter items that were first owned by Francis William Clark, who was just two when he was sent a 1912 first of The Tale of Mr Tod.

More than 400 objects from Howard Hodgkin’s (1932-2017) London home and studio will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s on October 24 in New Bond Street.

Keys is holding two specialist sales next year to whet the appetite. Not only does the Norfolk auction house have a shipshape selection dedicated to ‘local hero’ Nelson, but it has also secured the diploma collection of the Royal Society of Marine Artists (RSMA), Tom Derbyshire writes.

An example of the extremely rare, “surreptitious” edition of John Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis… – a star atlas that is one of the great rarities in its field – made a record £43,000 at Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on September 27.

Among the most coveted of all Martinware is the ‘Wally’ bird. These quirky and grotesque jars (really caricatures of people in Victorian London), were produced from the early 1880s onwards and were named after their maker Robert Wallace Martin, one of four brothers who ran the famous British pottery.

The currently vibrant market for Oceanic art was made plain to staff at John Nicholson’s (24% buyer’s premium) of Fernhurst in February this year when a Maori putorino or bugle flute, estimated at £50-100, sold to French dealer for £140,000. Surely, similar good fortune would not be repeated any time soon?

Originally due to be hosted by Rome, the 1906 eruption of Vesuvius meant that London was a late replacement to hold the fourth modern Olympiad in 1908.

The Bavarian capital city of Munich is an ever-expanding centre of prosperity, home to the carmaker BMW, leading insurers and major industrial concerns as well as numerous IT businesses.

Half a dozen works by the obscure British artist Valentine Dobrée (1891-1974) sold for multi-estimate sums at Reeman Dansie (20% buyer’s premium) in Colchester on September 26-27.

Huge new auction centre ready to launch on the edge of Bedford includes five salerooms...

Newly-independent Dreweatts will hold a third – and probably final – Mallett stock sale from Donnington Priory next month.