UK

Photographica 2019 is a destination for collectors of classic cameras. The fair hosts up to 135 tables for buying, selling and swapping classic and antique cameras from across the country.

The ‘Big Red’ Daytona reference 6265 is one of the most desirable Rolex chronographs from the 1980s.

With a documented provenance and inscribed by the maker Sébastien Garnier, Paris, 1747, a two-manual harpsichord was the top performer at the latest musical instruments sale held by Corsham, Bath, specialist Gardiner Houlgate (20% buyer’s premium).

Flemish Old Masters and Modern works combined to boost takings at two spring sales held north and south in England.

Universal Genève helped change the horological landscape in 1934 with the introduction of an affordable two-button Compur chronograph – a line that continued into the 1940s.

Lyon & Turnbull’s (25% buyer’s premium) inaugural Modern Made auction at the Mall Galleries in London received plenty of encouraging noises from the dealing and collecting community as it posted a total of £1m (including premium).

A significant collection of pictures by the Victorian watercolourist Albert Goodwin (1845-1932) was a near sell-out at auction in Suffolk and generated just under £120,000.

More homely than the material being produced in Scandinavia and France, the adzed oak furniture first made by Robert ‘Mouseman’ Thompson in the 1920s-30s was, nevertheless, a distinctive genre.

Based in one of the great centres of English glass, Fieldings (20% buyer’s premium) of Stourbridge has been building its reputation for glass sales over the past 15 years and today “nobody sells more glass than we do”, says specialist Will Farmer.

After abandoning his early career as a contributor to Punch and the Illustrated London News, Myles Birket Foster (1825-99) went on to establish his reputation as a painter of technically skilled and highly polished watercolours, depicting landscapes and rustic subjects from Scotland to the Mediterranean.

With his father-in-law David Benden, Andrew Bott runs five annual busy antiques and vintage fairs at the town hall in Clare, Suffolk, which also has a number of antiques shops and galleries.

Belinda and Tom Kilduff (pictured below) are Lincolnshire locals and Antiques & Home Show loyalists. They noted how “busy, condensed and lively” the one-day format was.

“I’ve sold Jesus Christ… could I interest you in St Patrick?” So asked Martyn Watson of Penrith, Cumbria, stalling out in the Epic Centre and keen to shift his statue of Ireland’s patron saint.

It was during the First World War that the convenience of the wristwatch began to replace the pocketwatch but it really came into its own with the production of bespoke ‘tool’ watches for submariners and airmen later in the century.

When it comes to early or vintage photographs the interest is often centred around the social history of the material – the camera’s ability to document past events, be they special occasions or scenes of everyday life.

Early views of China are often best-sellers in the realm of topographical photography. An album of 83 albumen prints from the 1860s-70s proved to be a major attraction at Bonhams’ latest book sale held in Knightsbridge.

At 'Photo London' next month Robert Mann Gallery offers 'Academic Nude – Tower of Ivory' by the once forgotten Canadian photographer Margaret Watkins (1884-1969), who ensured her legacy with a secret trunk of works.

Some time in the early 1930s, the burghers of Norwich City Council appear to have been sufficiently cutting-edge as to purchase furniture by the designer destined to become one of the major names of 20th century design, Alvar Aalto (1898-1976).

Two first-edition versions of George Orwell’s 'The Road to Wigan Pier', the first part of which is an investigation into the working-class living conditions in Lancashire, Yorkshire and the industrial north, were published in 1937.

Watch collectors priced out of the market for blue-chip branded sports models are finding value for money elsewhere.