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Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Industry trade bodies have launched a survey that will attempt to measure the financial impact of the Ivory Act (2018) which comes into force later this year. Collectors, dealers and auctioneers of antique ivory are being encouraged to take part.

Christie’s has raised its buyer’s premium, increasing the level at which its 25% threshold applies and adding an extra percentage point to its charges above £3m.

This late 19th century cameo glass vase by the highly collectable Stourbridge maker Stevens & Williams was the outstanding offering among the 195 lots at Michael J Bowman’s (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale at Chudleigh on January 19.

With vendors now well adjusted to realities of the market, the demand for standard Georgian furniture is unspectacular but steady.

On January 10, Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) sold a single-owner collection of polar and other travel books – reported in ATG No 2376 – but the Christmas/New Year period was a busy one overall for the North Yorkshire auction house.

Dated London 1679 in a Cheffins (22.5% buyer’s premium) sale of January 10 was a job lot that included four unframed Hogarth prints, a framed royal proclamation of 1800 relating to the production of grain and a “1679 broadside, printed for T.N. that is headed A List of the Parliament of Women”.

Small in scale and relatively light on the purse, buttons are a rich collecting seam that many can mine.

ATG has learned that the collection of rare Danish silver advertised on two pages of ATG No 2359 as stolen has been returned to its owner.

The best meat platters have weathered the dip in fortunes of Staffordshire pearlware. The Durham Ox series remains a favourite pattern and there was no shortage of northern private bidders when two c.1820 examples were offered at Tennants’ (20% buyer’s premium) Leyburn sale on January 12.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from February 5-14, 2019.

A collection of 18 bronzes of thoroughbred racing horses by major French animalier sculptors is to be offered at Drouot on February 22 by Beaussant-Lefėvre. They include examples by Isadore Bonheur, Pierre-Jules Mène and Emmanuel Fremiet.

A set of four Cotswold School Arts & Crafts wall sconces, one shown below, was catalogued by Moore Allen & Innocent (20% buyer’s premium) as in the Wild Strawberry pattern and in the manner of Ernest Gimson (1864-1919).

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

The potential for vendors and auctioneers to strike it rich in the field of Chinese works of art is alive and well.

A round-up of art and antiques news from the previous seven days, including Hertfordshire County Council's consignment of Mod Brit pictures to Cheffins.

The £140,000 record-breaking Cedric Morris lower painting at Chichester saleroom Henry Adams (plus 20% buyer’s premium) was not the only work by an artist-plantsman to feature in the January 17 sale (see ATG No 2377 for more on that Morris result).

Three modestly valued works in regional sales.

“There’s no money around in January” is the refrain you often hear from businesses in the new year. But, as we know, the auction world behaves differently from other commercial markets.