UK

Rocketing business rates and the impact of building works for Crossrail are to force the closure of Grays Mews.

A highlight of Sworders’ Country House sale in Stansted Mountfitchet on June 27 was a rare tinplate London omnibus.

The number of art dealers specialising in modern and contemporary art in central London is growing, and outstripping dealers in period work.

Dendritic agate – a pale chalcedony with treelike inclusions caused by traces of iron or manganese – is a relatively lowly stone but was a favourite of Russian jewellers in particular. Carl Fabergé used it in many pieces in a country where it is considered a stone of longevity, good health and prosperity.

A “jewel-like” painting of a young girl reading by Edward Frampton (1870-1932) starred in Dominic Winter’s (19.5% buyer’s premium) June 15 sale.

Bonhams’ (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale in Knightsbridge on June 14 included a group of pieces attributed to the British Arts & Crafts jeweller and designer Dorrie Nossiter (1893-1977).

Stealing all the headlines at Sotheby’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) Fine Jewels sale in London on June 7 was the £540,000, 26ct ’tenner’ diamond, bought by the vendor at a boot fair in the 1980s. However, among the 370 lots were items with more illustrious provenances.

A London street view by the northern English artist Harry Rutherford (1903-85) led the sale at Chiswick Auctions (22% buyer’s premium) on June 13.

Agatha Christie’s books were much in evidence at a Keys (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of June 7-8, among them a 1921 first of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

A festival to help raise funds for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in London and their families will run at Windsor Racecourse on Saturday, September 23.

Painter who fled London to create country scenes is now the subject of a Holborn show...

Whitford Fine Art’s ongoing exhibition Trans-Channel Crossing brings together works by four artists, two from the UK and two from Continental Europe, who lived and worked in both places after the Second World War.

For more than 10 years after its donation, this Suffragette banner sat stowed away in a cupboard at a little charity shop in Leeds. On June 20 it sold at local saleroom Gary Don for £13,600 (plus 21% buyer’ premium).

Exactly a week before Harry Rutherford’s ‘Camden Town’ painting sold in London (see separate Art Market story this edition), a small undated sketch, Female Nude, by his prolific mentor and tutor Walter Sickert (1860-1942) cropped up in Kent.

AD Antiques, run by British art pottery specialist Alison Davey, is selling this grotesque spoon warmer by the Martin Brothers.

Carmarthenshire is full of delights for antiques buyers. Here, we look at a brocante trial, views of castles coming up at a fair and another event in which you can go potty at a botanic garden.

David Newell-Smith, who together with wife Sonya ran the Tadema Gallery in Camden Passage, died on June 11.

'Tres Thomae…', by Thomas Stapleton, a leading Catholic theologian, is a set of three biographies of saints who shared his own first name. An exile from England, Stapleton was Professor of Theology at Douai at the time and his book was published there.