UK

MAINTAINING their policy of high-content, budget priced sales, the Norfolk auctioneers Keys put up a bumper June offering with a 1540-lot antique sale on June 26 and 27 following a 1236-lot collectors’ sale on June 14. Occasionally there emerges a high-priced star at these antiques offerings but in the quieter days of summer the best bid came for a Georgian-style pedestal birdcage supper table, 3ft 1in (94cm) which sold at £2450.

Everyone dreams of coming across a real gem at a car boot sale and this was the story behind a privately entered 19th century micro-mosaic oval panel in this Wotton Auction Rooms Gloucestershire sale on June 12-13.

An incomplete copy of one of the masterpieces of English botanical illustration of the 19th century, Mrs Edward Berry’s Selection of Hexandrian Plants (1831-34), offered at Christie’s on June 4 & 6 contained only 45 (of 51) of the younger Robert Havell’s partially colour-printed and hand-finished engraved and aquatinted plates, but it brought a bid of £60,000 from the Oppenheimer Gallery.

Foot and Mouth continues to ravage the businesses of Cumbria, but local private buyers and dealers had the capital to make a sizeable contribution to this monthly sale on the county’s west coast at Mitchells, Cockermouth.

UK: STANDING out from all the three-figure bids at this 412-lot dispersal at D.M Nesbit & Company on June 13, the £1000-plus results again underlined the trade’s willingness to fork out only on what dealers believe will sell quickly.

A sale of more than 400 lots at Phillips, Leeds on June 5– of which 80 per cent sold bringing a total of £122,000 – gave dealers and collectors from as far away as America and Australia an opportunity to assess the middle range of collectable glass and ceramics.

Bonhams & Brooks (15/10% buyer’s premium) held their Far Eastern Works of Art on May 30, a couple of weeks earlier than the other main auction houses.

Now that we cannot take what is left of our public services for granted, it is worth remembering that municipal fire brigades have only existed nationwide since 1938. When private brigades were the norm, the residents of towns and cities had to rely on firemen employed by private insurance companies, resulting in the bizarre sight of Commercial Union/Sun Life/Phoenix firemen idling in front of a blazing building insured by a rival company.

This dramatic theatrical costume for a warrior in yellow satin with gilt thread and silk embroidery took the top price in a sale of Asian Costume and Textiles held by Christie’s South Kensington on June 21.

For last November’s Asia series Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10 per cent buyer’s premium) switched from holding mammoth mixed Oriental offerings to more specialised separate Chinese and Japanese sales – an arrangement they continued for the summer Asian sales last month.

The London art market breathed a general sigh of relief last week after Sotheby’s and Christie’s Part I Impressionist and Modern sales belied the atmosphere of economic uncertainty with a clutch of high prices for classic works by the major names of late 19th and early 20th century art.

Dan Dare, pilot of the Future, makes his first appearance in the 1950 first issue of Eagle comic, alongside which is a 1953 Dan Dare Book of Jet Planes, with 3-D viewer. These were sold by Comic Book Postal Auctions, London, on June 12 for £248 & £130, respectively (+ 10 per cent buyer's premium).

A single leaf from a 1455 Gutenberg Bible, in a copy of Alfred E. Newton’s A Noble Fragment of 1921 sold at Bloomsbury Book Auctions on June 8 for £15,000 (+ 15 per cent buyer's premium).

UK: A COLLECTION of carte-de-visite photographs and signatures of leading figures of the Confederacy – the South’s leader, Jefferson Davis, and military leaders, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, among them – assembled by a Captain Busby of the Calypso, an English blockade runner, was one of more competitively contested lots in this Sussex sale. The collection was finally knocked down at £3000 to Julian Browning.

UK: IT HAS just been announced exclusively to the Antiques Trade Gazette that the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum, which holds one of the most comprehensive collections of coins and medals in the world, has received a very substantial grant to update and rewrite the history of Greek coins from their invention (c.630BC) to Alexander the Great (d.323BC).

UK: THE quarterly London Coin Fair, affectionately known just as the ‘Cumberland’ on account of its venue, that was held last Saturday (June 23) was the last to be held at the Marble Arch Cumberland Hotel, it has just been announced.

UK: TEA caddies and Tunbridgeware are both hot sellers at present and the combination in the form of this pretty piece, right, was irresistible to half a dozen bidders at the two-day sale held by Rendells (10 per cent buyer’s premium) at Ashburton on May 24 and 25.

UK: A HAMMER total of £94,350 from the 91 pieces to get away among the 109 offerings was an excellent start to the month when the Chester rooms could offer some real quality on a day dedicated to clocks and barometers.

UK: QUALITY items eagerly contested, patchy bidding on low to middle-range entries – a familiar countrywide pattern was evident at Bristol but it was a very unfamiliar piece which led the day.

UK: CHRISTIE'S South Kensington (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) chalked up another strong result to add to their successful run of mixed- and single-owner Staffordshire pottery auctions with the sale on June 14 of 273 lots from the Oxfordshire dealer Robin Sanders and Sons. A selection that also took in blue and white pearlware and ironstone tablewares but majored on Staffordshire figures, it saw all but 13 lots change hands netting £145,000.