London

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.

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.

The seasonal nature of the international Asian art market means buyers risk being swamped by the sheer volume of Asian art auctioned in a concentrated period. So it was the sale timing as much as the market freshness of a 103-lot private English collection of Asian works of art from a deceased estate that contributed to the success of Christie’s South Kensington’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) 465-lot outing on October 4.

IN 1845, aiming to create a test that would objectively record the characteristics and power of a microscope, the Prussian scientist Friedrich Adolph Nobert (1806-1881) invented a machine capable of drawing parallel lines minute distances apart.

London marine sales can be routine affairs, but there was a frisson of speculative interest in this unsigned and unattributed 19th century canvas, right, which ended the 171-lot picture section of Bonhams’ (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) October 1 marine offering in Knightsbridge.

ISLINGTON specialists in Arts and Crafts The Antique Trader move forward a few decades from November 5 to 23 for a selling exhibition of the hottest commodity of the moment, Art Deco. Called simply Art Deco, the show at The Millinery Works Gallery, 85/87 Southgate Road, London N1 brings together 180 exhibits from that period of immense creativity marked midway by the 1925 Paris exhibition of the decorative arts.

TEXTILES are currently a popular commodity and Wimbledon organiser Paola Francia-Gardiner, who operates as P&A Antiques, has two fairs next month catering for this still expanding market.

MIDDLESEX organiser Carl Barnes has found much favour over the years with his specialist clock fairs, so he was dismayed recently when fire destroyed the National Motorcycle Museum, long the venue for his Midland Clock & Watch Fair.

Included amongst the more venerable 18th century flutes, 19th century hurdy gurdies and 17th century harpsicords and spinets that make up the l03-lot sale of early musical instruments to be held at Sotheby’s Bond Street on November 25, is this unusual piece of more recent vintage.

Historians of the craft of fish carving currently believe that the Scotsman John B. Russell (1819/20-1893) was the first professional maker of such models. Working with carver John Tully at the Fochabers Studio, which made models for Farlow & Co. into the 1930s, Russell is known to have been producing these fine trophies from around 1880, although the early date to the example pictured here suggests some rewriting of the literature might be required.

Bonhams weren’t the only London salerooms to be offering a good selection of antique glasswares. On October 9, just a week after the Harvey’s dispersal, Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% per cent buyer’s premium) had a mixed-owner 280-lot selection of British and Continental glass to offer as part of their monthly At Home series.

London has shed its reputation as the world’s only major art market centre without a major contemporary fair with the inaugural Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park.