UK

AFTER a decade at the venue, Essex-based organiser Robert Bailey has decided not to stage his flagship fair at Claridge’s hotel in London this April.

Morphets, Harrogate, November 25 Buyer’s premium: 15/10 per centTWO different female figures stole the limelight at Harrogate; a rather racy bronze and alabaster, semi-nude who graced the catalogue front cover, and a much smaller, more demure, bronze bust of a young girl.

The Elizabethan communion cup of St Peter-with-Bastwick, Repps, pictured right, was stolen from a safe on the weekend of January 1-2.

THE New Barnham Auction rooms have just held their first fine art and antiques sale – only five weeks after taking over the premises.

Star billing at Christie’s King Street sale of selected English and Continental ceramics on December 6 went to three Meissen Augustus Rex covered baluster jars of 1740 with the AR monogram and Dreher’s marks XII to the base.

BOOKS, playbills and pictures from a collection formed by the late Gerald Tyler, an amateur actor and producer with the Leeds and Bradford Civic Theatres, founding chairman of the British Children’s Theatre Association and a man who was active in drama education, formed part of a January 8 sale held by Rowley Fine Art of Ely.

The Talbot Walk Antique Centre in Ripley and Wellers Auctioneers in Chertsey are holding a special auction in aid of the Tsunami appeal at Ripley Village Hall, Surrey this Sunday, January 30, at 5pm.

Two of the strongest performances in the December ceramics sales came from the glass sections offered at Bonhams Bond Street on December 8 and at Sotheby’s Olympia two weeks later.

Four antique clocks and two barometers were stolen in a raid on Chislehurst Antiques in Kent in late December.

Hamptons Fine Art Auctioneers have become the latest regional auction business to join The Fine Art Auction Group, parent company of Dreweatt Neate Fine Art and Neales of Nottingham.

BACK in London, until February 12, Mayfair purveyors of ethnographic and tribal items, the Gordon Reece Gallery, hold a sale of their current stock of antique rugs at their gallery at 16 Clifford Street, London W1. Rugs are offered at half price and, in true High Street clearance style, will be replaced daily “while stocks last”.

By and large the Cumbrian antiques trade were counting their blessings last week after escaping the worst of the floods that engulfed the region.

The Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum have added two paintings by Joseph Southall (1861-1944) to their internationally recognised collection of British Arts & Crafts.

The Victoria and Albert Museum will open a new Portrait Miniatures Gallery on March 2.

SOME areas of the art market seem impervious to the changing winds of taste. One is quality pictures of great European cities by recognised artists which appeal across the usual boundaries of generations and national borders.

Wallis & Wallis, Lewes. November 23. Buyer’s premium: 15 per centSales of arms and militaria can, with their beautifully chased old flintlocks and exuberantly decorated uniforms, somehow skate over the fact that often what is on offer is, or was, associated with the darker side of humanity.

ERICH Maria Remarque’s corrected galley proofs for the 1929, first bookform edition of Im Westen nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] brought a collector’s bid of £26,000 at Sotheby’s on November 30.

NOW a permanent fixture on the capital’s art scene, the seventh annual Art on Paper Fair will be held from February 3 to 6 at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7. It will be opened at noon on the 3rd by one of last year’s more colourful characters, Spectator editor, and lapsed Tory shadow spokesman for the Arts, Boris Johnson.

The 1150 lots offered at Essex auctioneers Ambrose (15% buyer’s premium) at Loughton on December 9 encompassed most areas of the market and, outside the jewellery, generally sold for three-figure sums.

Clarke Gammon Wellers, Guildford, October 26. Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent Although there were few four-figure highlights in this 711-lot outing, the 100-lot jewellery section had just the type of reasonably estimated, privately entered, material to attract dealers from London and the South East who, between them, secured the lion’s share of entries.