Exeter

Collected by a Scottish enthusiast, 26 railway station totems – the enamel signs introduced across the UK by newly nationalised British Rail in 1948 – gained UK-wide interest at McTear’s (24% buyer’s premium) in Glasgow.

This spiral-moulded cream jug decorated with a drummer boy is from a well-documented Caughley tea and coffee service painted with figural subjects by Fidelle Duvivier during a brief period of work at the Chamberlain factory in Worcester in October 1792.

Essay warns about considerable perils of the ‘indecent custom’ of burials in churchyards

A First World War medal fashioned from a Mexican eight reales coin was an unusual feature of a group sold at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (23% buyer’s premium) on February 19.

With an Irish silver ‘seal salver’ gleaming at the first Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (23% buyer’s premium) sale of the year (ATG No 2427), Italy, China and Russia provided other highlights.

This 18th century English provincial school full-length portrait depicts the jester Black John. He was in the employ of the famously eccentric John Arscott (1718-88) of the Tetcott estate in Devon, said to be the last man in England to keep a professional jester.

On the death of the monarch, or when a statesman left office, it was required by law that any seals of royal authority be broken and defaced.

A bid of £5000 from a Contemporary art gallery in London secured this post-war portrait by the writer and Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957).

Run by Devon County Antiques Fairs for many years, the renamed monthly Saturday Exeter Matford Antiques and Collectors’ Fair was taken over by SP Fairs, aka Sue Ede and family, last year.

A flurry of bids emerged for this late-17th century canine study at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood of Exeter (23% buyer’s premium).

Bearing a modest estimate of £50-75 but sold instead at £800 by Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (23% buyer’s premium) on September 4 was a copy of 'Women’s Suffrage: a Short History of a Great Movement' (1912) by that renowned campaigner for women’s political rights, Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

The second published work of the ‘flower book lady’ has no other auction appearance

Topped by an eight-times estimate £19,500 Momoyama ‘Namban’ cabinet (ATG No 2391), Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood’s (21% buyer’s premium) sale in Exeter on April 16 had other estimate-busting lots from abroad.

A table game published by John Wallis called The Mirror of Truth was one of two notable juvenilia lots in the opening children’s and illustrated books section of a March 6 Devon sale.

Rare examples of early English porcelain are still capable of remarkable sums.

The sale at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (plus 21% buyer’s premium) on January 29 – an event dominated by the multi-estimate performance of a Qianlong mark vase in the Ming taste sold at £460,000 (see ATG No 2378) – also included a hardwood (probably olivewood), bone and mother-of-pearl inlaid model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Works by two artists who made the ocean their muse were the focus of a small collection at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium) on January 29.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Alongside living with bushmen in Africa, visiting 33 native tribes in Brazil and riding the length of the Great Wall of China, the Cornish-based explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison (b.1936) also found time to pursue another passion – one much closer to home.

At a time when catering for niche interests is a profitable path for auctioneers, recent sales in Scotland, Ireland and England have shown that the furniture market can still come to life – provided it meets three criteria.