Wales

ARCHITECTURAL antiques and stained glass specialist Drew Pritchard is holding a trade and professional open day on Saturday June 19 to officially mark his company’s move into splendid new showrooms and workshops at St. George’s Church, Church Walks, Llandudno in North Wales.

NEARLY 1300 lots were offered by Anthemion Auctions of Cardiff in an April 21 sale of sports memorabilia and among the soccer programmes, there was a bit of a shock when a 1945 programme for a Newport County v Chelsea match, valued at £30-40, was bid to £2600!

WITH a style, as one writer has put it, “sweetly intensified to a point where the world is reduced to a world of gossamer”, Annie French (1872-1965) was a Glasgow School artist who took the Art Nouveau idiom of Beardsley and Burne-Jones to new decorative extremes.

Welsh Ceramics in Context: Part I, edited by Jonathan Gray, published by the Royal Institution of South Wales, Swansea Museum, Victoria Road, Swansea SAl lSN. ISBN 0950851752 £17.50sb. THIS well-illustrated book is based on the papers delivered to the first Welsh Ceramics in Context seminar held at Clyne Castle in 2002.

ARE there any corners of Britain where the trade can enjoy an old-fashioned auction without the intrusion of confident private buyers? If so, Abergavenny is no longer one of them.

Setting a new house record at Carmarthen auctioneers Peter Francis on March 9 was this 18th century Coromandel Coast marquetry inlaid padouk, ebony and ivory chest of five short and two long drawers.

THE Staffordshire potters never missed a commercial trick. Despite the political differences that may have existed between the USA and Britain following the War of 1812, large quantities of transfer-printed wares were made specifically for the American export market during the first half of the 19th century.

NOW operating as Continuity Fairs, veteran organiser Donald Bayliss has been putting fairs together for at least three decades, but seldom has he been as excited as he is about his second International Antiques and Collectors Fair of Wales, which will be held in Builth Wells on October 11 and 12.

FOR the second time, the crowded sporting calendar at the city’s Millennium Stadium has forced the Cardiff Antiques and Collectors Fair to relocate to nearby Cowbridge.

DUELLING pistols often attract considerable interest and one of the top lots in this 1162-lot Welsh sale at Anthemion on 16 July was a pair of pistols by Wogden & Barton, 1795-1803.

David Rogers Jones has sold a lot of Welsh dressers in his 44 years as an auctioneer in the principality but only two of this rare form incorporating a grandfather clock. Peculiar to the mid-Wales county of Merionethshire, the form, c.1810, is well-known in the reference books but this is the first the auctioneer has seen since he sold another 15-20 years ago. And it’s a great example.

VETERAN organiser Donald Bayliss, who operates out of Ludlow as Continuity Fairs, reports a stunning response to his first International Antiques and Collectors Fair of Wales, which was launched at the Royal Welsh Showground at Builth Wells over the Bank Holiday weekend of May 3 and 4.

SOLD AT £600 (Temple) in the April 25 sale held by Y Gelli (15% buyer's premium) in Hay-on-Wye was a “much nicer than average” copy of the 1886, privately printed, Lahore first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Departmental Ditties and other Verses. One of 350 copies of this tall, narrow production, printed on one side only, it was in the original wrappers but with the flap removed, leaving an uneven fore-edge to the upper wrapper.

WALES’S top dealer in things Welsh, Richard Bebb, holds his annual selling exhibition of vernacular crafts at his showrooms, Country Antiques, Castle Mill in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire from May 28 to June 7.

BIRTHDAY greetings to the Carmarthen Antiques and Collectors Fair, for a decade Wales’ top antiques show.

AN album containing 101 photographs of military, topographical, architectural and sporting subjects in India, Kashmir and Afghanistan was the principal attraction for some in a March 12 sale at Hay-on-Wye held by Y Gelli.

AS a one-off, the spring version of the twice-yearly Cardiff Antiques and Collectors’ Fair decamps to the nearby country town of Cowbridge. Carmarthen-based Robert and Carol Pugh, who operate as Towy Fairs, have been forced out of their regular venue, the Cardiff Bowling Club, by a rather rougher fixture than bowling, the Rugby League Cup Final which will be held at the Millennium Stadium on the same weekend – April 26 and 27.

VETERAN organiser Donald Bayliss, who put together his first fair in the 1960s and now operates out of Ludlow as Continuity Fairs, is launching a new event in mid-Wales in the Spring.

WELSH organisers Robert and Carol Pugh, who operate as Towy Antiques Fairs, finished last year with a flourish when their pre-Christmas Carmarthen Fair at the local showground proved surprisingly successful.

Understandably, the Russians left this one behind when they liberated the Reichstag in 1945, but a Tommy NCO with a sense of humour decided to rescue this beleaguered portrait of the First World War German Field Marshall and Weimar president Paul von Hindenburg, right, from the ruins and take him back to the West Country.