Front Page and News

A white porcelain sculpture made in the experimental years of the Chelsea factory has been acquired for the national ceramics collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Trade bodies and dealers with shops have given a collective thumbs-up to the new Conservative government’s pledge to slash small business rates by half.

Scientific instruments and photographica specialist Flints Auctions has opened new premises and is launching a fresh type of sale.

Rescued from a skip, a rusting British enamel advertising sign sold for £10,400 (plus 24% buyer’s premium) at auction in Carmarthen.

A Yongzheng (1723-35) mark and period falangcai enamel bowl sold for €3.25m (£2.8m) to lead the recent round of Asian art sales in Paris.

Peninsular War medals featuring 13 or 14 clasps – showing how many actions the recipient fought in – are impressive enough in themselves. But three of them awarded to brothers who served in the same regiment, offered as a single lot at auction, takes demand to a different level.

An intaglio ring became the second of the ‘lost’ Marlborough jewels to surface at auction in 2019 when it sold for £36,000 (plus 22.5% premium) in Cambridge.

HMRC is to update UK art market professionals with guidance and webinars in January ahead of the introduction of new anti-money laundering legislation.

In the 130th anniversary year of the birth of Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), a collection of ceramics by the leading figure of the French avant-garde was a sell-out at Bonhams’ Prints and Multiples sale on December 11-12.

Jeremy Lamond, former director of Halls, will be joining auction house Woolley & Wallis at the end of March 2020 as head of the valuations department and associate director.

Two key early maps of colonial North America were offered for sale at Ramsay Cornish in Edinburgh on December 7.

Two leading BADA members have reported strong sales to close out the year.

In the third multi-million-pound sale this year of a rediscovered Old Master at a provincial French auction house, a late Gothic panel offered at Cortot & Associés of Dijon brought a dramatic competition late last month.

This rare piece of Cork silver of Irish Republican interest sold for £4000 (plus 23% premium) at Sworders latest sale.

After a 17-minute bidding battle, a Chinese blue and white bottle vase with a Daoguang (1820-50) six-character seal mark was hammered down for £270,000 at Gorringe’s in Lewes, East Sussex.

The next staging of the venerable Art & Antiques Fair Olympia will run longer to incorporate two weekends.

Two recently restituted panels by Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo (c.1399-1482) lifted the latest series of Old Master auctions in London.

An autograph painting by German artist Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-79) was one of the stand-out sales during London Art Week (LAW).

Edward Baldwin, fourth generation and the last of the Baldwin clan to work for coin and medal dealership AH Baldwin & Sons has retired from the firm.