UK

Travelling from Glasgow to the south of England courtesy of a commission bid, this Hornby-Dublo train EDG 7 tank goods set, right, went at 10 times the lower estimate at McTear’s (24% buyer’s premium) sale on February 1.

Bonhams’ (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) latest sale of 19th century pictures in London may have been small – running to just over 100 lots – but what it lacked in size it made up with the broad scope of its contents.

Two unusual and successful lots from a February 20 sale held by Lockdales (19.5% buyer’s premium) of Ipswich.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

This 1962 photograph of artist Lucio Fontana, below, is included in the UK’s first solo show of works by Ugo Mulas (1928-73).

The plethora of single-collection sales at the start of the year was not at the expense of old-fashioned auctions offering good-quality offerings across the range of dealing and collecting – such as the Winter Fine Arts sale at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) of Dorchester.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from March 5-16, 2019.

The sale at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (plus 21% buyer’s premium) on January 29 – an event dominated by the multi-estimate performance of a Qianlong mark vase in the Ming taste sold at £460,000 (see ATG No 2378) – also included a hardwood (probably olivewood), bone and mother-of-pearl inlaid model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

What seems to have been an overdue clear-out at Monmouth Trading Standards department led to half a dozen lots of imperial weights and measures being consigned to Stroud Auctions (18% buyer’s premium).

A small group of lots in a recent Edinburgh sale were once part of the library of the late 5th Earl of Lovelace at Torridon House.

Helped by conservatively pitched estimates, a clutch of middle-market Orientalist pictures achieved some modest growth in value on their first return to auction in three decades.

A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening… is the single volume that I have selected from a recent Gloucestershire auction in which job lots were very much in evidence and that acted as a sort of extra, clearing-the-decks sort of exercise in the saleroom’s calendar.

William Wyllie’s 1917 watercolour HMS New Zealand – The Sixteen Point Turn at Jutland was among the stand-out sales at the inaugural Connect Art Fair where it was offered for a price in the region of £20,000.

Precisely four months on from a flood inundating its saleroom, Carmarthen auction house Peter Francis (20% buyer’s premium) enjoyed a literal and metaphorical day in the sunshine on February 13.

This study (below) was one of 10 drawings by Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98) consigned by an unidentified charitable trust to Bonhams’ 19th Century European, Victorian and British Impressionist Art sale on February 20.

Regarded in their time as examples of the finest cabinet-making rather than simply reproductions, good 19th century French revivalist furniture remains in demand.

Sold for £900 by Toovey’s (24.5% buyer’s premium) on February 19 was an elaborately bound example of Monsieur Gravelot’s Almanach Iconololgique… for the year 1771.

Illustrated with eight hand-coloured litho plates, each with moveable flaps, The Puppy’s Visit To His Friends was issued as one of EC Bennett’s moveable books, probably in the 1850s.

Annual BADA event includes copy of Reni work commissioned by the pope or a cardinal.