Auction Reports

This silver tennis bangle, below, triggered a classic singles match at auction.

Top-seller at Richard Edmonds’ (20% buyer’s premium) latest specialist motoring accessories sale was a hanging lightbox proclaiming the virtues of Pratt’s Perfection Spirit.

Catalogued as a ‘tin glazed hand painted Chinese vase – 17in (42cm) tall’ and estimated at £50-80, a late 17th century Kangxi period famille verte porcelain vase of waisted trumpet form sold on June 22 for a healthier £12,000 – 150 times the top estimate.

Topping by some way an offering of 300 pieces of jewellery at Lyon & Turnbull’s (25% buyer’s premium) Edinburgh sale was a Persian gold and niello decorated Esther Scroll holder.

A sale with multinational appeal – and a baroque revival cabinet spared from Rentokil.

Italy – or more specifically Sicily – came up trumps for Stamford auction house Batemans (20% buyer’s premium) in the form of this 4½in (11cm) carved coral and copper-gilt urn and cover.

Other than davenports, few pieces of functional antique furniture fell farther down the price ladder during the slump than sofa tables but the examples here bucked the fashion at Moore Allen & Innocent (20% buyer’s premium) of Cirencester.

The fitted interior of this William & Mary casket, below, was later but its fine brass-bound marquetry exterior with hidden lock mechanism made it the most eye-catching lot at Mallams’ (22.5% buyer’s premium) auction in Cheltenham on June 6.

Ceramics commemorating the coronation of Edward VIII are less rare than often supposed, having been produced in abundance before the coronation was aborted. Most bring relatively small sums.

Featuring in the same two-day auction as a £7000 cache of Beatrix Potter ephemera found in a Cumbrian Victorian villa which had made national headlines, this less-heralded sofa impressed at 1818 Auctioneers (17.5% buyer’s premium).

In the 1950s French designer Raymond Cohen and his firm Cohray were producing a range of ultra-modern furniture that – although made for the machine age – were all put together by hand.

The resurgent interest in quality Japanese material and the slower revival of English furniture were both evident in a cabinet on stand sold at West Sussex auction house Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium).

In the dispersal by Hansons (20% buyer’s premium) of the collections of Harold and Mary Wilson, the book section included copies of John Maynard Keynes’ 'General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money' of 1936 and 'A Treatise on Money' of 1933.

Mallams (20% buyer’s premium) offered 12 impeccably provenanced pieces by Peter Waals (1870-1937) at Oxford on May 23.

More of a curiosity than a clock but a decorator’s dream, a life-size caricature of a smiling Chinese man clutching a willow-pattern plate with gilt dragon hands emerged in the Ayr rooms of Thomas R Callan (17.5% buyer’s premium).

The sale of a remarkable gramophone collection two years ago at the Cotswold Auction Company (20% buyer’s premium), in which an EMG gramophone took £6500, prompted the consignment of another large collection to the June 4 sale at the Cheltenham rooms.

A consignment of furniture from the medieval Eastington Hall, Worcestershire, boosted Chorley’s (20% buyer’s premium) latest sale in Prinknash Abbey, Gloucestershire.

Best-seller and one of the biggest surprises at the white-glove sale of a mechanical music collection was a musical box, the catalogue entry of which could be summarised as ‘famous name, doesn’t work’.

The May 22 sale at Dreweatts of Donnington Priory titled Japanese, Islamic and Indian Works of Art included a collection of Iznik and Damascus tiles from the estate of the artist Sir Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017).

While British studio potters were battling to break through in the 1930s, established factories, even Moorcroft, were struggling to survive the Great Depression.