Auctions

One half of an extensive single-owner collection of novelty Victorian and Edwardian silver and glass animal objects went under the hammer at Reeman Dansie’s two-day sale in Colchester last week.

An unusual belt buckle by the Parisian jeweller and glass maker René Lalique which had been worn by the vendor throughout her nursing career has sold for £19,000 at a North Yorkshire auction.

Cotswold auction house Moore Allen & Innocent is trialling a new operation to encourage more people to attend its saleroom.

Rare as Forres silver is, three pieces by the Highland town’s smiths John and Patrick Riach were on offer at Edinburgh auction house Thomson Roddick (17.5% buyer’s premium) on October 11 – the fiddle pattern dessert spoon, below, and two characteristic Scottish toddy labels.

The jacket of the 1904 first of Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf shown right is quite obviously in a sorry state – falling apart and with sizeable sections missing all round. It is, however, a jacket previously known only by rumour or talk of ‘one other copy thought to exist’.

Catalogued as a ‘travelling ensemble’ these two oak fitted cases of silver tableware, below, conjure up images of lavish inter-war era picnics.

Since Jamaica declared independence in 1962, art on the Caribbean island has swung between two major styles: ‘mainstream’ and ‘intuitive’.

Born partly out of necessity and partly out of a reaction to austerity, British design in the immediate post-war era underwent a flowering of innovation with new styles, new materials and a fresh impetus that resulted in a very different class of furniture.

Following the wake of the influential 1862 International Exhibition in London (when Japanese art first reached a wide British audience), this tea service below would have been the height of fashion when it was made by Richard Martin and Ebenezer Hall in 1879.

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.

This pair of Commonwealth silver plates, London 1645, bear the contemporaneous arms of the Puritan Bulstrode Whitelocke (1605-75).

This fine pair of Victorian silver six-branch candelabra sold to a United Arab Emirates bidder on thesaleroom.com for £13,000 at John Nicholson’s (24% buyer’s premium) in Haslemere, Surrey, on October 15.