Auctions

Bidders given a first slice of Britain’s ‘biggest collection of breadboards’ from museum in family home

A George II silver pocket microscope made by John Clark of Edinburgh c.1750 sold for £34,000 as part of the  sale of items from the library of Enlightenment era Scottish mathematician James Stirling (1692-1770).

Phillip Segal Toys are very much rarities. He began production in Hampshire in 1938 but was halted when wartime restrictions banned the use of lead.

ATG’s pick of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com, featuring both the highest prices over-estimate and the top prices paid online.

A sale conducted by US firm Connecticut River Book Auction (15% buyer’s premium) on September 5 included a very rare copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince.

Woolley & Wallis (27% buyer’s premium) considered the Elizabethan bed offered on October 1 to be to ‘by far the most original to be offered at auction in recent years’.

The Kiryu Kosho Kaisha (The First Japanese Manufacturing and Trading Company) was set up by the Meiji government after the great success of Japanese crafts at the Weltausstellung 1873 Wien (Vienna world’s fair).

Doyle (28% buyer’s premium) set a record for an artwork by Mathilde, Princess Bonaparte (1820-1904) at a sale in New York.

Original manuscript copies of the famous medieval Paston Letters come to the rostrum in Norfolk

A ‘monumental’ pair of 15-light silver candelabra made by Tiffany & Co for a member of the Vanderbilt family hammered for $230,000 (£171,565) at John Moran Auctioneers (27% buyer’s premium) in Monrovia, California.

Franz Xavier Kosler (1864-1905) made his reputation painting Arabian market scenes and the art market continues to admire them.

The Collector sale at Bishop & Miller in Glandford, near Holt, on October 29 included this late Victorian taxidermy case of two of New Zealand’s rarest birds.