London

A Dutch auction house is planning to launch regular sales in London as, it says, the art and antiques market in Holland has contracted.

When Frances Noble, head of Dix Noonan Webb’s jewellery department, was shown this coronet with a family tradition connecting it to the Duke of Wellington, it was caked with dirt.

Used to dramatic effect on the cover of the catalogue for a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale, shown below is one of a collection of around 125 monochrome watercolour drawings of Irish lighthouses and the Irish coastline produced c.1860-67.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

One of the best-known faces on the fairs circuit is Matthew Adams, who has organised for nearly 40 years a monthly antiques fair at the Royal Horticultural Fair in London.

The work of the MacMahon photographic studio of Aberdeen, this extraordinary carbon print was made in 1908 and depicts ‘Giant Cod Specimens…’ bought and cured by A&M Smith, a local fish processing and curing business.

Antiques Trade Gazette can confirm that Chiswick Auctions has proof of good title for a rare group of maps and charts, which the auction house sold last month.

Rountree Tryon Galleries and director James Rountree have been granted a Royal Warrant by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

A remarkable Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes collection which was consigned to auction by their daughter, Frieda Hughes, ran to some 100 lots and formed a separately catalogued part of a recent Knightsbridge sale.

Early maps and charts, previously owned by a Brazilian banker convicted of money laundering, surfaced for sale at Chiswick Auctions last week.

Guy Peppiatt specialises in 18th and 19th century British watercolours and drawings and is based in Mason’s Yard, St James’s.

Slow and steady. That, dealers reported, was the general course of sales at the recent British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA) fair.

Panter & Hall holds an exhibition of the works of Alberto Morrocco (1917-1998) in its Pall Mall gallery this month.

In a career of remarkable highs and lows, incorporating high political office, financial scandal and near bankruptcy, enormous success as a novelist and imprisonment for perjury during a libel case that he had won years earlier, Jeffrey Archer has himself been the subject of many a caricature and cartoon.