Europe

A trip to France before Christmas to buy unusual gifts is always a good plan. Here are three antiques and vintage brocantes to visit: two well-known weeklies in Paris and a biannual event in Bordeaux.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from December 3-15, 2018.

The three volumes noted here are English language highlights of a separately catalogued, 380-lot, single-owner collection in the October 30-November 1 series of sales held by Reiss & Sohn (18% buyer’s premium) that was offered under the title Wirtschaft und Staat – or Economy and State.

Italy, like many European countries whose economies were ravaged during the war, had to face the challenge of picking itself up and starting afresh once hostilities were over.

It is the quirky designs of husband-and-wife team François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne that populate the top echelons of so much French design in the salerooms these days.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from November 27-December 7, 2018.

The French dealer François Laffanour, whose Galerie Downtown is on the rue de Seine in Paris, has specialised for 25 years in furnishings by post-war architects and designers.

A cartographic highlight of the mammoth October 30-November 1 series of sales held by German auction house Reiss & Sohn (18% buyer’s premium) was the Insulae Moluccae… map shown below, which sold for almost four times the estimate at €38,000 (£33,670).

Of all the types of playful drinking cups or trinkspiel made by Dutch and German goldsmiths during the 16th and 17th centuries, the example offered by Sotheby’s in Paris last week was surely the most elaborate.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from November 20-December 1, 2018.

Dogny Auction in Switzerland will be offering around 75 lots of ceramics and other Asian works art from the collection of Rolf Heiniger in its winter sale on December 4-5 in Lausanne.

The London watchmaker John Ilbery, active from 1780-1839, is credited with the invention of the ‘montre chinoise’, highly ornate goldenamel watches made for the Chinese market.

The year 1907 was a decisive one in the artistic development of Lyonel Feininger (1871- 1956). In the previous year he had left his wife and family and moved with his new partner Julia Berg to Paris, where their son Andreas was born.

The sales of Asian art at Lempertz in Cologne traditionally devote a large selection to Japanese works of art and the auction on December 7-8 is no exception.

Among the lots in the sale of porcelain and works of art at Metz in Heidelberg on December 15 about 80 Asian pieces come from an old German collection that was on loan to the state museums in Berlin for many decades from 1963 onwards.

A number of works designed by some of the biggest names in the Wiener Werkstatte association are to be offered in the Jugendstil auction at Dorotheum on December 12. Among them are two brooches designed by Josef Hoffmann.

Take nine five-clawed dragons, add 19 bats and place them among swirling clouds and breaking waves and you have the décor of a very rare 18th century iron-red and underglaze blue moon flask that is one of the star lots at Nagel in the sale in Salzburg on December 6-7.

In 1921, the opening of the spring trade fair in Leipzig was accompanied by inauguration of the socalled Porzellan Palais.