Auctions

Glass specialists Liz and Mike Flatter will be first-time exhibitors at the IACF Shepton Mallet antiques and collectors’ fair at the Bath and West Showground on Friday to Sunday, January 18-20.

Testament to a vibrant market for vintage Tudor wristwatches, a very scarce Oysterdate – the reference 7031 or ‘Homeplate’ – proved the star of Hansons’ Christmas auction at Bishton Hall, Staffordshire.

A fine example of a dirk, without which no Highland formal dresswear is complete, was among the stand-out lots at Cuttlestones’ (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale at Penkridge on November 22.

Three-day auction at Cumbrian saleroom demonstrates global reach of art and antiques.

Eight determined bidders were on hand when Karl & Faber (25% buyer’s premium) sold a floral still-life by Nicolaes van Veerendael (1640-91) at auction in Munich.

Two pieces with imperial connections took the top honours during the November 5-23 sale at Hermann Historica (25% buyer’s premium) in Munich.

One of the more unusual corkscrews to come onto what is a fiercely competitive collectors’ market recently was a brass, steel and wooden contraption of the type one may have seen clamped to the bar of fin-de-siècle brasseries.

While £90,000 is an awful lot of money for an empty metal box, this old black painted and gold lettered deed box does bear the magic name of Winston Churchill.

This unfinished oil sketch of a tree was kept by pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) until his death and sold in his last major studio sale, held in 1926 at Christie’s.

A selection of three works priced under £1200 at UK regional auctions.

Topping the results list at a recent sale at Grisebach (30/25/20% buyer’s premium) in Berlin was a work by the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that was created on island in the Baltic.

One of the most iconic photographic images of war came under the hammer at a recent Westlicht (20% buyer’s premium) auction in Vienna.

Since the early 1990s Wolfgang Thillmann, a German and philosophy teacher, has devoted himself to collecting Thonet bentwood furniture and become an internationally acknowledged expert in the process.