UK

François Linke 1855-1946: The Belle Epoque of French Furniture by Christopher Payne, published by the Antique Collectors’ Club. ISBN 1851494405 £75hb

ARTS Minister Estelle Morris will hold a seminar for the trade on the new UK measures to restrict the illicit trade in cultural objects. Slated for January 15 in the BP Lecture Theatre, at the Clore Education Centre of the British Museum, the session will see Miss Morris give a presentation on the UK implementation of the 1970 UNESCO Convention, the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003 and the new Money Laundering Regulations.

DECANTERS of all types from the 18th century to the present are the subject of an exhibition running at the Broadfield House Glass Museum, Dudley, until April 18 next year.

As York silver becomes both too hard-to-find and too expensive to buy, there is increasing interest in early wares from the Sheffield assay office. The manufacture of silver in Sheffield did not begin until the second half of the 18th century – a direct offshoot to the Old Sheffield Plate and the cutlery industry.

Return to original Art College venue: FACED with the unexpected loss of their 2004 fair venue, the organisers of the 20/21 British Art Fair have struck a deal for a new space at short notice. Next September 15, the five-day fair will return to its previous venue, The Royal College of Art.

IT was one of those landmark events that generated a perceptible buzz of expectation and drew the English porcelain collecting fraternity out of the woodwork en masse. Bonhams’ November 26 auction of the collection of the late Billie Pain pulled a capacity crowd to their Bond Street rooms and saw the trade and private collectors contest the 341 lots of prime early English porcelain to almost £782,000, getting on for twice the pre-sale predictions.

With Sotheby’s £6.7m Russian Pictures sale notching a hatful of records four days earlier, it was hardly a surprise to see some unfamiliar leather jacket-wearing, mobile phone-wielding characters turning up at Gorringes’ (15% buyer’s premium) November 21-23 sale at Lewes to view four paintings from the estate of a Knightsbridge-based lady who had once dealt in Russian objects.

Private consignments of Chinese porcelain are increasingly difficult to source and competition is rife between provincial and London rooms. Prices regularly spiral for the best quality works whether they are offered in the provinces or in the capital.

West End public relations firm Focus PR have been appointed to head up communications services for next summer’s Fine Art and Antiques Fair at Olympia.

Gone are the days when collectors could afford to ignore anything but the finest quality early 18th century imperial porcelain in mint condition. The burgeoning of interest in this field from Far Eastern collectors has ensured that when such pieces come under the hammer, the prices realised are out of the reach of all but the seriously wealthy.

Dealers and collectors with money in their pockets at the end of Asia week were rewarded with a trip to Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on November 14. The room was full for this 478-lot auction, with mainland Chinese and Far Eastern buyers interested in two conservatively estimated, market-fresh, non-European collections of Chinese calligraphy brushes and archaic jades.

Christie’s King Street (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) were the only major house not to offer a single-owner sale in addition to their 163-lot mixed owner outing on November 11, but they managed to find buyers for the best quality private entries that sold well.

BUCKINGHAM Palace will host an extensive exhibition next year entitled George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste. Opening on March 26 in The Queen’s Gallery, it will feature 500 objects, drawn entirely from the Royal Collection and constituting what is thought to be one of the largest and finest groups of Georgian material ever assembled.

This impressive and highly finished late Queen Anne model of a 40/44 gun 5th rate ship, right, created a huge splash in Christie’s South Kensington’s 554-lot sale of Maritime models and marine paintings on November 19 when it sold for £600,000 (plus 17.5/10% premium), single-handedly providing over a third of the sale’s £1.36m total.

Plans are serious but it will take years to fulfil them: Olympia’s owners have assured the Antiques Trade Gazette that plans for a large casino at the West London exhibition complex will not affect the Fine Art and Antiques Fairs.

IN February 2004 Sotheby’s New Bond Street will mark the centenary of Cecil Beaton’s birth with an exhibition of his most celebrated photographs. Beaton at Large, which runs from February 10 to 20, will complement the National Portrait Gallery’s major retrospective, Cecil Beaton: Portraits, which runs from February 5 to May 3.

Samuel Watson (1649-1710) is not perhaps as well-known as his contemporaries East, Knibb, Graham or Tompion but he is one of the blue chip names of late 17th century London clockmaking – good enough to enjoy the patronage of both Charles II and Sir Isaac Newton.

NORTH Yorkshire organisers Galloway Antiques Fairs have events coming thick and fast this month and less than a week after shutting up shop at Dunscombe Park in their home county, they head north for The Scone Palace Antiques Fair, Perth from November 14 to 16. The popular Scottish fixture has been fully booked for some time with 33 exhibitors.

Italian Sales: FOR the first time in 10 years, neither Christie’s nor Sotheby’s held an October sale of German and Austrian art. The German economy is currently in far too fragile a state to support a major sale of Expressionist material in London and theme-minded Contemporary and Modern specialists concentrated their attention instead on October’s annual round of 20th Century Italian Art sales.

THIS week sees a two-day international conference at The Savoy in London to mark the centenary of the National Art Collections Fund. Saving Art for the Nation, A Valid Approach to 21st-Century Collecting? runs on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 11 and 12, and will focus on whether it matters if works of art that were once the pride of British private collections go overseas and how they should be rescued for the nation if we believe it is important to keep them here.