Auction Reports

Fifteen furniture lots make five-figure sums as Dreweatts bidders show encouraging confidence

Morphets (20% buyer’s premium) of Harrogate sold a Mouseman bureau for a tub-thumping £36,000 on April 15.

A Mitchells (22% buyer’s premium) sale included selected contents from Greystoke Castle near Penrith – home to the Howard family for over 500 years.

This unmarked teapot and cover, offered by Dreweatts, dates from the first decade of porcelain production at the Chelsea factory.

A Victoria Cross group awarded to a British soldier who volunteered to carry a vital message to a stranded platoon at Mericourt in October 1918, in the knowledge that five of his comrades had already been in killed in turn making earlier attempts, sold for £200,000.

Armorial head linked to the palaces of Henry VIII when he was married to Anne Boleyn.

South London auction house Roseberys (25% buyer’s premium) was instructed to sell the collection of Herbert Kennard on March 26.

Not to be confused with the modern Peter Rabbit series by Wedgwood, much scarcer teawares were made by the Grimwade’s factory in the 1920s.

Original photographs of a well-known Pre-Raphaelite beauty – the muse of William Holman Hunt and the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell – sold for £2600 at Sworders (25% buyer’s premium).

Estimated at just £100-200, a rare automaton of a stereotypical Chinaman smoking an opium pipe sold for £7400 at McTear’s (24% buyer’s premium).

The best known of the decorators who worked at Aynsley in the 20th century is the flower painter Joseph A Bailey.

Two English Orientalists made the biggest impression at a recent sale at Gorringe’s (23% buyer’s premium) in Lewes.

The name ‘peg tankard’ comes from the vertical row of pegs inside that can be used to measure the amount of alcohol drunk as it was passed around a table.

The sale of Islamic Art & Antiquities at Roseberys London (25% buyer’s premium) on March 31 included this New Kingdom yellow quartzite shabti fragment.

The West as well as the East made a major contribution to the success of Gorringe’s £1m sale on March 30 where, overall, 86% of the 593 lots sold.

Estimated at £60-80 but sold at £11,500, this set of 14-point deer antlers provided Martel Maides (17.5% buyer’s premium) with a sensational result.

When Cecil Beaton photographed the Wyndham-Quin sisters in 1950, he chose to copy both the setting and poses used 50 years earlier by John Singer Sargent in The Wyndham Sisters.

Michael Harris signature piece sells well at auction alongside Louis Osman silver spoons set

This particular form of English delft puzzle jug, with its distinctive knopped neck, seems to be peculiar to the second half of the 17th century.

With hindsight, the boast made by the Flying Steam Company – 'To China in Twenty-Four Hours Certain' – was a tad ambitious.