UK

A sale at Gildings in Market Harborough this month included 10 lots from the family of Albert and Nora McGill – influential industrialists credited with a key role in the founding of Russia’s cotton mill industry in the mid-19th century.

Three Islamic and Indian art dealers have teamed up to launch an exhibition coinciding with the London auction event Islamic Week.

The Lostwithiel Antique Fair was started by Lynne and Richard Bonehill (the late actor and sabre champion). The current organisers Anne and Nigel Allen will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the monthly fair on Sunday, October 13, in the town’s community centre.

Turbulent as politics are today, they have yet to reach the rumbustious heights of a notorious 1826 by-election in Northumberland, memories of which were revisited at Newcastle auction house Anderson & Garland (20% buyer’s premium).

Pair of candlesticks light up auction with surprise result.

Harry Becker (1865-1928) is not well known outside East Anglia but he is much admired both for a skilled grasp of Impressionism and his choice of subject matter.

Before he learnt to paint, Sheffield-born artist Joe Scarborough (b.1938) was a laboratory assistant at Batchelors, the processed food company, then a face worker at the Thorpe Hesley colliery.

The 19-acre former South Crofty tin and copper mine in the village of Pool, near Redruth in west Cornwall, closed as recently as 1996 and is now part of a local mining landscape World Heritage Site.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales below £2000, including a pen and ink wash by Paul Sandby.

Roy Oxlade (1929- 2014) emerged in the 1950s as one of a distinguished group of painters, including Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, who studied under David Bomberg at Borough Polytechnic in London.

Bearing a modest estimate of £50-75 but sold instead at £800 by Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (23% buyer’s premium) on September 4 was a copy of 'Women’s Suffrage: a Short History of a Great Movement' (1912) by that renowned campaigner for women’s political rights, Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

Our regular listing of British and Irish book auctions.

Our weekly selection from salerooms.

Mayfair show features 12 ‘seminal masterpieces’ first collected by Scottish baroness

Antiques Fairs Cornwall, which runs a biannual two-day fair at the Royal Cornwall Showground, holds its regular monthly antiques and collectors’ fair at Pensilva near Liskeard. This is the largest one-day fair in Cornwall with up to 74 stands.

Signed by its author to the title-page, a 1939 first of TS Eliot’s 'Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats' sold for £4300 in a Dominic Winter (20% buyer’s premium) auction.

John Jesse died unexpectedly this month in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. He was 83. He will be remembered and missed by many in the art trade.

A late Victorian diamond cluster necklet with an estimated total weight of 14.4cts sold in its original fitted case for £10,500 at Richard Winterton (20% buyer’s premium), Lichfield.

The jewellery sale at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury on October 30 includes over 60 engraved gems – both ancient and Neoclassical – from several single-owner collections. A selection of rings is pictured here:

This 21 x 15in (54 x 39cm) watercolour, below, probably depicting the New Julfa quarter of Isfahan, is by the Armenian-Iranian painter Sumbat Kiureghian (1913- 99).