London

THE Metropolitan Police have announced a five-day course to provide practical solutions in the prevention and detection of art crimes.

If maritime artefacts are your thing, set sail for Christie’s South Kensington. There’s a positive marina’s worth of material on offer on June 19 in the first of their two annual sales held in London devoted to all manner of marine artefacts and paintings.

BRITAIN’s leading furniture maker and designer John Makepeace calls this exotic and exquisitely crafted one-off piece of furniture English Fruits, and the circular table will be the centrepiece of a special Makepeace feature at the entrance of the Daily Telegraph/House and Garden Fair at Olympia from June 27 to 30.

TOP people’s favourite antiques event The Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair has been running since 1934, the age of Deco, and as an established part of the London Season is not the place that comes to mind when thinking of something for the decorators.

Marcel Breuer is one of the major names in furniture associated with the Bauhaus design school. When examples of his distinctive take on modernist furniture design come up for auction they regularly make substantial sums, but it is rare for an entire collection to find its way under the hammer especially a collection of specially commissioned pieces from a named provenance.

This rare Elizabethan oak draw leaf refectory table proved to be the chief atttraction at the sale of the late Clive Sherwood’s Collection offered by Sotheby’s Olympia (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on May 22, when it sold for a mid-estimate £55,000 to a London dealer.

JOINING the illustrious roster of exhibitors at this month’s Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair, which runs at Mayfair’s Grosvenor House Hotel from June 12 to 18, is the distinguished arms and armour dealer Peter Finer.

This portrait miniature of a 30-year-old lady by Nicholas Hilliard, dated 1582, set a new auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s Olympia rooms on June 6 when it sold to a private collector bidding on the phone against the room for £200,000 (plus premium).

VALUE investor Jack Petchey has taken just under a 20 per cent stake in Mayfair dealers Mallett. He acquired the 2.66m shares, representing a 19.28 per cent stake in the company, at a price of £2.10 a share, from Merrill Lynch, on May 30.

TILES: Tiles seem to be the new hot collecting area in British decorative ceramics. Following on from a sellout exhibition at Richard Dennis’s shop in Kensington last year, Bonhams held a sale of ceramic design in January that featured a large collection of De Morgan tiles which were pursued by a determined band of private collectors to prices that rivalled those of the pottery’s striking hollowwares.

The smallest (but not the smallest grossing sale) in the London rooms last month was the 115-lot, £581,000 gathering of 20th century Decorative Arts offered by Christie’s King Street on May 15.

Paul Sumner, managing director of Sotheby’s Olympia, has resigned from the company and is returning to Australia where he plans to set up his own business.

AN ex-Cambridge University student, jailed for four years for plundering priceless historical book collections, may face a stiffer sentence unless he repays hundreds of thousands of pounds.

THIS wig powderer was made in York in 1817. Described in Michael Clayton’s book The Collector’s Dictionary of Silver & Gold of Great Britain & North America as “a tapering cylinder, from the cover of which rises a tube with a mouth of spherical form,” this type is dated to around 1800.

Painter Albin Burt’s customised copy of an otherwise standard textbook, a two-vol., 1817 edition of Stewart’s Elements of the Natural History of the Animal Kingdom, contains extensive manuscript additions and hundreds of original illustrations to add to the basic 12 engraved plates.

THIS unrecorded portrait by John Constable, estimated to make up to £80,000, was discovered by East Anglian auctioneer and fine art broker John Vost during a routine valuation at a house on the Suffolk/Norfolk border.

LONDON antiques centre Antiquarius say they are delighted to have the opportunity to sign up some of the dealers who have quit nearby Bourbon-Hanby in a disagreement over rent rises and lease terms.

THE seven medals and insignia right are a stirring memento of one of the greatest moments in British military history. They are the service medals and awards, including the G.C.B and K.C.B of the Order of the Bath, Netherlandish Military Order of William and Russian Order of St Vladimir, presented to General Sir Peregrine Maitland.

The defence and relief of Mafeking (1899) in the Boer War has a particular resonance in British history, and three Victoria Crosses were awarded for valour during the action. As a result, medals from this action generate more than usual interest.

More Renaissance items came up at Arsantiqva (15% buyer’s premium) at the Westbury Hotel on April 19 with the first of three tranches of material relating to the serene city of Venice.