UK

Andrew Sim favours artists and images that have slipped through the system. Ahead of his appearance at the upcoming '20/21 British Art Fair' he talks to ATG about chasing the unknown...

Sir Stanley Matthews’ first football contract showing the legend was paid a princely £5 a week has sold at Derbyshire saleroom Hansons.

With everything buzzing at Chiswick Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) ahead of the opening of the South Kensington showroom next week (see last week’s ATG No 2305), life at the west London rooms goes on providing a solid base for this ambitious expansion.

Tribal Art London, the annual UK fair, seeks to raise the profile of this market in the capital.

A horological story rarely makes the national news, but the announcement that Big Ben is falling silent until 2021 as major conservation work begins rang loud and clear in headlines.

Some auctioneers believe they are rock stars when they take to the rostrum. But the owner of a new auction business in the north-west has been closer to real-life rock stars than most gavel-masters.

Catching the eye at the Oriental Sale at Cheffins (22.5% buyer’s premium) in Cambridge on August 10 were the two highly collectable 4¾in (12cm) tall gourd cricket cages shown here.

It was the 18th century Dutch silversmith John Schuppe who first popularised the silver cow creamer in Britain in the 1750s. Over the following centuries his design captured the imagination of the upper classes, who commissioned these novelty jugs in droves.

Tattooed from head to foot, this ‘Native of Nukahiva’ (in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia) features on one of the two frontispieces and a folding chart that form the illustrative content of the 1813, first English edition of Adam von Krusenstern’s 1803-06 Voyage round the World…

The Giant Flea and Collectors’ Market at the Royal Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet is almost fully booked inside with 200 stallholders.