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SILVER: Good commercially appealing entries were what was finding favour with both trade and private buyers at Christie’s South Kensington’s second silver sale of the year, the 158-lot £136,123 gathering held on February 19.

THE auctioneers’ decision to place the first half of a sizeable consignment of furniture from a North Oxfordshire house in Mallams January sale paid dividends when the 87 lots provided half of the £130,000 total of the 277-lot sale.

THE Staithes Group, the band of artists who made the North Yorkshire fishing village their home before some moved to the South West and Newlyn, are the subject of an impressive exhibition put together by Cumbrian dealer Peter Haworth (Tel: 015395 62352).

It was standing room only at Sotheby’s Bond Street on February 26 when the auctioneers sold the David Sylvester collection. In a room packed with dealers, collectors and friends of the late art critic, plus a phalanx of Sotheby’s staff manning a bank of telephones, the auctioneers offered 149 lots of paintings, drawings, sculpture, tribal art and antiquities, and as lot after lot outstripped the estimates, it was clear that their £1m projection was going to be dramatically exceeded.

HOLLAND: IN honour of the Netherlands’ long tradition of landscapes and town scenes Christie’s Amsterdam (buyer’s premium 20.825 per cent) had a topographical theme to its pictures sale on January 22.

BELGIUM: Antwerp’s four main auction-houses have announced plans to co-ordinate their sales and viewings for the first time.

THE relative strength of Old Master paintings in comparison to other sectors of the market has been noted at a number of recent auctions, but this new-found strength, it seems, is not just restricted to top-end sales in London and New York.

The second Detling fair of the year (February 23-24) indicates that the trade is not being put off by the Kent Act.

Top seller at a brisk day’s bidding at the Cheltenham sale held by Mallams (15% premium) on January 31 was a pair of classical style gilt metal and lapis lazuli urns and covers, one shown right.

FOOTBALL programmes were the mainstay of this mixed book, card and ephemera sale for Acorn Auctions in Trafford Park, but though one job lot of two dozen Manchester United programmes of 1960s-80s vintage did sell for £620, a similar number of single sheet programmes of 1945-46, valued at up to £2000, failed to sell, and for once it was Manchester City who came out on top.

Echoes of the Kent County Council Bill can be discerned in changes announced to the VAT secondhand margin scheme (notice 718). Dealers who use a system called Global Accounting to calculate VAT on profit margins will have to keep a record of the names and addresses of sellers on purchase invoices – a main requirement of the Kent Bill – when the changes come into force on July 31 this year.

FRANCE: Auction turnover in France, for sales by commissaires-priseurs, rose 4.4 per cent in 2001 to €1.9bn (£1.17bn). There were significant regional increases in Lyon & the South-East (up 14 per cent to £180m, with Lyon itself contributing over one-third of that figure) and Brittany-Anjou (up 17 per cent to £102m), whereas Normandy suffered a dip of 19 per cent with sales of £86m.

PARIS: Ten works by Philippe Hiquily (born 1925) surfaced in the Camard sale at Drouot on February 8, comfortably exceeding predictions to post “record prices” and enjoy what Camard called “tremendous success among French and foreign collectors and decorators.”

Transferring fine vintage wines from the bottle to the decanter without disturbing the sediment has been an age-old concern of those who take their wine seriously. It was clearly a concern in the 18th century, as can be attested by this ingenious and now rare George II silver wine syphon, right, which came under the hammer at Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) February 19 sale of Selected Silver and Plate.

CHRISTIE’S have announced that they have been instructed by the Marquess of Bath and his trustees to sell 400 lots of paintings and works of art from Longleat House. The aim is to raise over £15m to set up a maintenance fund for its preservation.

PARIS: The whole history of French coins from Gaulish times to the present was covered by the Jean Vinchon (10.764% buyer’s premium) sale in Paris on November 6. Because it was a single collection rather than the random assemblage that chance had brought across the counter there were many choice examples on offer.

USA: Wedgwood wares formed a significant slice of Skinner’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) 890-lot auction of English and Continental furniture and decorations on January 19. Of the 230-odd lots of ceramics that featured in the sale, two-thirds comprised works from that factory.

A large desert Caravane by Victor Huguet (c.1895), 4ft 4in x 6ft 8in (1.31 x 2.02m) and inspired by Fromentin, led the Delorme-Fraysse picture sale on February 12 with €82,000 (£51,200).

AUCTION houses, dealers and other fine art businesses can now buy in expertise as and when they need it, rather than having to take on full-time staff.

Sotheby’s July 11 Old Master sale will include the re-discovered Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) oil on panel The Massacre of the Innocents, pictured right.