Auctions

While TS Eliot’s poem 'The Waste Land' had appeared in book form in the US in 1922 – and in two magazines the same year – the edition published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in Richmond, Surrey in 1923 was the first in the UK.

The latest Homes & Interiors sale at Sworders included an extraordinary and highly personal relic from the Waterloo battlefield: a silver-mounted inkwell made from the ear of a war horse.

Back in July 2019, Lawrences in Crewkerne set a new high for a Mouseman carving when a pair of elephant bookends by master carver Stan Dodds (1928-2012) sold at £10,000.

Battle saleroom Burstow & Hewett (20% buyer’s premium) recently sold the ‘contents of a Sussex manor house’ – the lifetime collection of a local antiques collector and dealer.

On July 23 London-based specialist coin and medal auction house Morton & Eden is offering a complete set of 56 Umayyad gold dinars dating from years 77 to 132 in the Hijra calendar (696-750AD).

Our selection of lots from 10 upcoming auctions

This stoneware pond by Robert Wallace Martin, measuring 6ft 6in (2m) across, comprises 40 architectural elements, each incised with fish and aquatic creatures among water weeds.

A recent rare books sale at Heritage Auctions (25% buyer’s premium) in the US delivered strong performances for a handful of coveted 20th century firsts in dust jackets.

When Daniel Lambert, the famously rotund prison warden from Leicester, died in June 1809 at the Waggon and Horses Inn at Stamford, Lincolnshire, the title of ‘England’s fattest man’ transferred to a new contender.

Based in Lyndhurst in southern England, the late Victorian painter Arthur Batt (1846-1911) ploughed his artistic furrow painting dogs and donkeys either as portraits or in New Forest settings.

A fine example of French Art Nouveau furniture more than doubled its high estimate at Collective Hudson (30% buyer’s premium) in Kingston, New York.