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Some dealers believe that the market for plated silver has never been the same since the Italians ducked out in the mid 1990s, and while it is true that types such as entrée dishes and tureens have gone off the boil, there is still (always?) demand for candelabra, anything set with mother or pearl or ivory (American interest here) and table centrepieces like the three examples illustrated here which were offered at Bonhams Chester (buyer’s premium 17.5/10 per cent) on November 6.

Robert Finan has been holding these specialist sales at the Ship Hotel for six years and next year intends to go quarterly. With the major UK auctioneers having shipped their tribal art departments to Continental Europe and America, the valuer’s biannual outings are just about the only chance for the serious connoisseur to root out African totems and Maori weapons from the colonial timecapsules of the British countryside.

The paintings of Edwin Long (1829-1891) are well known to London’s gallery visitors, since there are works by him in both the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy, but many of his works have long been lost or forgotten.

The results of Hong Kong’s October Asian series underscored the increasing polarity in this market in which there seems no limit to collectors’ and dealers’ insatiable desire for the best Qing dynasty mark and period porcelain or quality Chinese works with good provenance, but little interest in more standard Oriental fare.

The claim against London art dealers Agnews over a painting formerly attributed to Constable has been settled out of court. Sir Simon Day launched the claim over a series of free valuations carried out on the painting – Hampstead Heath: Branch Hill Pond – from 1975 until the late 1990s.

In Cologne on October 26 W.G. Herr (18% buyer’s premium) staged a Jubilee sale to mark their 50th auction in the cosy Friesenwall gallery where, as he puts it, Werner Herr has been “swinging the hammer” for 20 years.

For all those fans who ever longed to run their fingers through Elvis Presley’s hair, now there’s a chance. While locks or strands of Elvis’ boot-polished black hair have been sold in the past, one of more than 1400 memorabilia lots in a sale closing on November 14-15 on www.mastronet.com is something just a bit special.

Back on October 8, Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% per cent buyer’s premium) held one of their periodic silver sales where the emphasis is on Scottish and Irish silver. There is a keen collector’s market for such pieces if they are unusual in some way (carrying scarce Scottish provincial marks, for example), but standard material, as with much else in the silver field, is less eagerly snapped up unless very keenly priced. So it proved here.

Wine-related silver is sitting at the top table of the market at present as the luxury boozing culture of hard-working businessmen props up the value of coasters, labels, corkscrews and funnels. But one area that has not benefited so much from the interaction of wine merchants and boardroom boys in recent years has been the standard Victorian decanter and claret jug.

There were no massed ranks of Prussian royal silver on offer at Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% per cent buyer’s premium) on October 24. On offer here was a good 350-lot commercial mix of English and Continental fare from a variety of sources which netted £310,000.

THAT the Berkshire auctioneers Law Fine Art could garner more than 1000 lots, sell more than 70 per cent of them and reach a total of £160,0000 for this latest of their thrice-yearly ceramics and glass sales says as much about Mark Law’s and Nicholas Lyne’s operation as it does for the general strength of ceramics in these generally difficult times.

LONDON: AXA Art Insurance, sponsors of Asian Art in London, have announced the winners of the two AXA Art Awards, one for two-dimensional and the other for three-dimensional works.

Antiquities dealers could find their trade in legally exported artefacts threatened despite due diligence if the Egyptian government succeeds in reversing Sotheby’s sale of a granite bust of Ramses II.

The importance of clear due diligence in dealings has been highlighted by an Irish court overruling the country’s statute of limitations on stolen goods in a civil case.

The Impressionist and Modern sales were not the only New York sales last week to smash auction records. Christie’s November 5-6 sale of 19th and 20th century prints brought an extraordinary record price for a single print by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. La Grande Loge, an 1897 lithograph in colours on wove paper, was an extremely rare and previously unrecorded colour trial proof produced before an edition of 12.

The patent dispute pitching a Virginia inventor against eBay appears to be heading to trial. US District Court Judge Jerome Friedman issued a series of rulings in late October that, while firming up aspects of eBay’s defence, rejected the company’s attempts to have the claims – made by MercExchange, a Virginia technology company – thrown out.

UK: SOTHEBY’S have denied reported claims by a gang caught in possession of stolen antiques that they had an insider working at the auction house. The theft was highlighted after the arrests of four Romanians and one Kosovan last week during a police sting to uncover an alleged plot to kidnap the celebrity Victoria Beckham.

The trade were in mourning last week following the deaths of New York-based dealer Tom Devenish, aged 84, Guildford dealer Charles Traylen, aged 96 and London silver dealer Michael Koopman, aged 56.

DESPITE warning after warning – the latest on the front page of last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette – dealers are still falling foul of Fairguide, the Vienna-based firm who have been misleading the trade into ordering unwanted advertising for years.

OF the three new world auction records taken at Christie’s Rockefeller Center saleroom on the evening of November 6, two of them were for pieces of sculpture. This follows on from Christie’s success in the May Impressionist and Modern sales, their best – as Sotheby’s were for them – for some time, when Constantin Brancusi’s 1913 bronze Danaïde took $16.5m (£11.6m), the highest price for any piece of sculpture sold at auction.