Scotland

Dublin and Edinburgh rooms all but double sales totals as Bonhams raise stakes in Scotland

Weighing 1.5 tonnes, Eduardo Paolozzi’s (1924-2005) Master of the Universe is winched into position outside the Edinburgh saleroom of Lyon and Turnbull. The sculpture, one of an edition of four, provided the highlight of the auctioneer’s first Contemporary Art Sale on September 1, selling to Edinburgh gallery Bourne Fine Art on behalf of a client at an artist’s record of £120,000 (plus buyer’s premium).

By the mid 19th century it had been completely discredited as a science, but between the 1820s and 1840s phrenology was at the peak of its popularity. And Edinburgh, where the first phrenological society was founded in 1820, was one of its centres.

FOOTBALL may be known as The Beautiful Game, but as anyone who supports a Scottish non-league team will tell you, it can sometimes seem more like viewing a scrum than watching a spectacle of sublime flair and silky skill.

JUST weeks after Clarion abandoned plans for reviving a Glasgow fair a group of Scottish dealers have announced a new Scottish event, The Merchants’ Hall Fine Art & Antiques Fair to be held in Edinburgh from September 22-24.

Giving Scotland’s once-neglected art glass further standing in the saleroom, a good range of Monart and Ysasrt glass emerged at auction recently North of the Boarder.

CLARION Scotland have cancelled the Fine Art and Antiques Show Scotland scheduled for the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, Glasgow from August 17 to 20. The new fair was essentially a relaunch of Fran Foster’s Antiques For Everyone Glasgow, which ran at the SECC for six years until its final staging in May 2005.

It gives some idea as to how furniture connoisseurship has changed that the upholstered high-back chair pictured here could once have been accepted as an original furnishing from the bedroom of Mary Queen of Scots.

There was high drama at Lyon and Turnbull’s Edinburgh saleroom on March 26 when this celadon moonflask, left, estimated at £2000-3000, shot to a house record £275,000 (plus 19.5/12% buyer’s premium).

CLARION Events Scotland are launching a new antiques fair at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow this summer. The announcement comes less than a year after Antiques For Everyone Glasgow fairs, also owned by Clarion and at the same venue, were discontinued.

Two lavish catalogues, a DVD, three days at Syon House, trips to the USA and Hong Kong, acres of press coverage… Sotheby’s and Christie’s apart, seldom can a UK auction house have devoted more time, more energy and more money to promoting a sale than Lyon & Turnbull did with the Drambuie Collection.

On a cold January 26 night in Edinburgh, a packed saleroom at Lyon & Turnbull witnessed a defining moment in the Scottish art market.

Clarion Events have announced the “postponement” of next summer’s Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow.

UNCERTAINTY surrounds the future of the Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow fairs which have been staged for the past six years at the Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre, Glasgow.

The Scottish Executive is considering introducing a licensing scheme for the trade in non-domestic knives and banning the sale of swords. Both measures could impact heavily on the antique arms market.

The latest round of golf sales held up in Scotland threw up a now-familiar pattern of mixed results.

LIKE so much material where the name is so much part of the game, the exquisite objets d’art fashioned in the Russian workshops of Carl Fabergé have attracted copyists, repro-producers and outright forgers.

AFTER the mixed response to the Christopher Dresser material offered at Lyon & Turnbull (Buyers Premium 17.5%), it was left to the catalogue of decorative arts, consigned by various vendors, to provide the auctioneers with their biggest number of the day.

Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon and Turnbull have secured one of Scotland’s key art collections for sale in January 2006.

EXPECT around 90 dealers, just a handful down on last year, in Hall 3 of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre for the sixth Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow fair from May 13 to 15.