UK

CHELSEA antiques centre Antiquarius has been looking a bit tired of late but its new manager Neil Jackson is determined to put the pep back into the enterprise, which was launched at 131-141 King’s Road, SW3 in 1970 by antiques market pioneer Bennie Gray and is now owned by Atlantic Antiques Centres.

ANTIQUES never have a low profile in Harrogate, but over the next few weeks they will dominate the North Yorkshire town with three fairs in the vicinity and the numerous antiques shops and galleries making a special effort to impress the autumn visitors, traditionally many of them antiques tourists.

A DEALER from Melbourne, Australia was one of the first through the doors, and certainly the most welcome visitor at Caroline Penman’s first Bury St. Edmunds Antiques Fair, held at the Athenaeum in the Suffolk market town from September 3 to 5.

SOME provincial auctioneers and London’s major houses batten down their hatches during the traditionally dead month of August, but for Scarborough Perry (15% buyer's premium) it was business as usual for their August 12-13 sale.

THE Rates of Merchandise, that is to say, Subsidy of Tonnage, ...Poundage and ...Woollen Clothes, or Old-Drapery, as they are Rated and Agreed on by the Commons House of Parliament..., a 1660 copy in rebacked contemporary calf of the book of rates required by the passing of that year’s Act of Tonnage and Poundage, was sold for £1000 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of June 17.

Right: sold for £4200 in the July 21 sale held by Lyon & Turnbull at Jordanstone, an Ayrshire country house, was Rowlandson’s The Comforts of Bath, a set of a dozen prints issued by Fores in 1798, and here loosely inserted in an album of full red crushed morocco.

OMENS could not be better for the 20/21 British Art Fair, which, from September 15 to 19, returns to its roots at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 after a couple of years down the road at The Commonwealth Institute.

SOLD for £30,000 at Bonhams on July 15 (as part of the big natural history sale) was a rare series of six mid-18th century engravings dealing with the training of racehorses.

INNOVATIVE Oxfordshire dealers The Country Seat may be best known as furniture specialists, but they are increasingly turning their focus towards 19th and 20th century design.

PLENTY of art and antiques on offer around the capital this month but the imaginative Mayfair tribal art specialists the Gordon Reece Gallery have come up with a different take on the decorative, with a selling exhibition they hold at 16 Clifford Street, London W1 until October 2.

RIGHT: though I suspected a sub-text, this black letter broadside, printed “at London in the Olde Baily by Richard Lant for Thomas Porefut in Paules Churchyard at the sygne of Lucrese”, seems to offer a straightforward account (in a translation by Renolde Olyver) of a violent storm and consequent disasters that took place at Mechlin [Malines], near Antwerp, in August 1546.

HERTFORDSHIRE organiser Paul Bishop, who founded Oxbridge Fairs to mount specialist glass events, holds his fourth Cambridge Glass Fair at Chilford Hall Vineyard, Linton, Cambridgeshire this Sunday (September 12) and, with 100 tables, it is fully booked.

ORGANISED by the Cotswold Art & Antique Dealers’ Association, in association with the Thames Valley Antique Dealers’ Association, a fun day out with, hopefully, a bit of business thrown in, is promised at the annual swap shop and dealers’ cricket match at Stow-on-the-Wold next Tuesday, September 14.

AS usual, the London Photograph Fair is fully booked for the event this Sunday (September 12) at the Bonnington Hotel in London’s Bloomsbury, WC2.

SOLD for £25,000 at Sotheby’s on June 25 was a group of letters, documents and sketches by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, or Il Guercino [the ‘Squinter’], his painter nephew, Benedetto Gennari and his patron Claudio Bertazzoli, that relate to the former’s altarpiece for Santa Maria della Pieta dei Teatini in Ferrara – The Purification of the Virgin.

FOR their selling exhibition of 70 Japanese woodblock prints to the end of November, the Japanese Gallery at 66D Kensington Church Street, London W8 have chosen the theme Snow, Moon & Flowers.

IN a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6, a 1678 first (in full panelled calf) of Some Proposals for the imploying of the Poor. Especially in and about the City of London. And for the Prevention of Begging, the only known publication of the philanthropist Thomas Firmin, was sold at £1100.

SOLD for £3000 to David Stone in an Y Gelli sale of July 23 was a first edition set of Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’Antique Expliquee... of 1719-57, comprising ten vols. (in 15) including supplement.

FOUNDED in 1950, and still one of the capital’s most familiar antiques events, The Chelsea Antiques Fair has marked the beginning of the autumn anti-ques season for decades, as it will again when from September 17 to 26 it runs at its usual venue, Chelsea Old Town Hall in the King’s Road, London SW3.

MIDDLESBROUGH specialist in Moorcroft, Carlton Ware and Linthorpe pottery Jim Shaw, better known as Appleton Antiques, has given up his stands at the Red House Antiques Centre, York and The Ginnel, Harrogate, although he keeps a toehold in the latter, renting a cabinet.