Auctions

Found among the contents of a storage unit, a watercolour of Venice by Edward Lear (1812-88) starred in Brighton General Auctions’ (15% buyer’s premium) sale on July 28.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period August 2-9, 2017. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

Collectors of works by the Rhead family of potters will no doubt have September 5 already marked in their diaries.

Below we present further highlights from the busy summer season that we didn’t have space for in earlier editions.

Cheffins of Cambridge is offering two drawings by Alberto Giacometti (1901-66) at auction on October 12.

The sales held by a variety of Monaco auction houses that are a feature of the summer season are traditionally big on jewellery, cars and Hermès handbags and other luxury accessories and modern art.

Large numbers of lots identified only as folders, boxes and albums full of prints, watercolours, maps and so on offered in a Brightwells (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of July 5 included one disarmingly catalogued, in full, as ‘Sketches, Watercolours, Prints of Naked Ladies, chiefly’. It sold at £500.

‘L’Abbé Quille’ (shown below), against whose leg a dog is seen relieving itself in the illustration, is one of 84 hand-coloured plates – 12 each of seven subjects – that make up a French magic trick book of c.1799 sold for £2900 by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) in a June 19-20 sale.

The final session of James D Julia’s three-day sale of more than 1600 lots to be held in Fairfield, Maine, from August 16-18 is devoted to Asian art.

Triple lens or Triunial magic lanterns were the iPhone 8 of their day. Since the days of the Sturm lantern in the 17th century, the technology had developed from basic projectors producing small, dimly lit images, to these magnificent machines capable of spectacular technicolour lantern entertainments.

A US judge has ordered Christie’s to identify the winning bidder of the $12.5m (£9.7m) Guennol Stargazer, an ancient Anatolian idol auctioned in New York in April.

As weapons of war, swords have an impressively long history, as demonstrated by recent auctions around the world. From two £11,000 Viking swords at Bonhams in London to General Patton’s 1945 presentation sabre at Hermann Historica (€54,000/£47,370), there were centuries of warfaring history on view, including blades from Japan, Korea and Greece.