London

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

A unique Victoria Cross and other awards won by one of the greatest heroes in Canadian history is to be auctioned by Dix Noonan Webb on September 27.

Thomas Del Mar, former Sotheby’s specialist and founder of the 25 Blythe Road group of auctioneers, turns fair organiser next month. The first Olympia Arms Fair takes place on September 30.

Sold for £400 on July 5 by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium), as part of an online sale of cricket books, was one of just 50 specially bound copies of The Catch: A Correspondence by Harold Pinter and Alan Wilkinson.

Operations behind enemy lines was the theme linking two special forces medals groups sold by London auction house Spink (20% buyer’s premium) on July 26.

So enamoured was Deco dealer Bill Jones of Style 1900 with the biannual Art Deco fairs held in the Great Hall at Eltham Palace in south London that he started his own: in Norfolk and East Sussex.

Considering there were only 150 men defending Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus, an impressive number of medals awarded after that epic 1879 encounter have come to auction recently.

Chiswick Auctions is to open its South Kensington showroom manned by a group of former Christie’s staff early next month.

In our continuing series looking through the keyhole of ‘bricks and mortar’ shops, ATG talks to Tino Quaradeghini, who opened Regent Antiques in 1980.

In the days when loved ones in the armed forces would head abroad on service for up to several years, not knowing when or if they would return, ‘sweetheart’ brooches were a way of remembering them.

The British Museum’s big summer exhibition on Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai is over, but more art from the Land of the Rising Sun is in the offing (also see International Events, ATG No 2305).

The London Antique Arms Fair is usually a biannual event, but this year the organiser is rather busy – in November they are putting together the Passchendaele Salute 2017 at Fort Seclin near Lille, France.

A 1765 first of John L Cowley’s The theory of perspective demonstrated… sold for £17,000 by Christie’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 12 appears to be the only first edition recorded at auction.

Dealer Colnaghi is launching a foundation to bring Old Master paintings to a “21st century audience”.

The Doccia factory is perhaps best known for its hard-paste sculptures – many of them near-direct copies in porcelain of 17th and early 18th century bronzes. The key figure is the talented modeller Gaspero Bruschi, himself a Florentine sculptor.

A new book, The British Underground Press of the Sixties, marks the birth of the countercultural press and all the music, fashion and controversy it represented.

A complete list of exhibitors standing at the British Antique Dealers’ Association’s (BADA) inaugural collectors’ event has been announced.

Mr Benn is already the hero of his own series of illustrated children’s books and a 13-episode BBC animated programme. In his 50th year, however, there are displays of renewed interest in this adventurous everyman.