UK

The Victorian fascination for natural history led to many a front parlour having as its centrepiece a cased display of butterflies.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

James and Jessica Rawlin of J&J Rawlin specialise in Modern British art and contemporary British ceramics. They are based in rural Suffolk. Here, James talks about their business and how they started it.

While good-quality but familiar Georgian silver such as entrée dishes, tureens and sauceboats estimated in the £6000-12,000 range met stiff resistance at Dorchester auction house Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) on June 28, two top-quality pieces made their money.

This Daum cameo and enamel vase decorated with a winter landscape from c.1900 is one of the pieces offered on the stand of Solo Antiques at the next Galloway Antiques Fair, where it is priced at £5950.

As collecting evolves, many pieces of decorative, and historically captivating, Georgian silver are priced very keenly at both auction and retail.

Extra outside pitches have been hailed by the organiser of the monthly Tuesday antiques market at Sandown Park Racecourse as a reason for the relatively new event settling in well.

A dispute over the ownership of a score by Sir Edward Elgar involving the BBC and the former Conservative MP David Mellor could lead to the manuscript being given to the British Library.

The so-called auricular style – all organic fluid lines and asymmetrical shapes populated by marine invertebrates and reptiles – can first be found in the 1598 ornament book of Northern Mannerism, Architectura…, by Wendel Dietterlin of Stuttgart.

Pairs of Georgian candlesticks by the best-known London specialist makers such as William Cafe and Ebenezer Coker continue to sell well enough, as long as condition is acceptable.

An early Anglo-Dutch portrait of the swashbuckling English sea captain Sir Francis Drake topped Bonhams’ Old Master paintings sale on July 4 in New Bond Street. It sold for £290,000, just below its juicy £300,000-500,000 guide.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from July 25-August 15, 2018.

Auction houses in Bristol, Staffordshire and Norfolk have chosen to invest in new premises this year. Suggesting continued confidence in the regional auction market, Bristol Auction Rooms, Potteries Auctions and TW Gaze are planning to open new salerooms by the autumn.

This novelty silver scent bottle, below, appealing to two niche sections largely immune to the swings of the larger silver market, was a target for collectors when offered at Chiswick Auctions (25% buyer’s premium).

Considering that Norwich was, after London, the largest and wealthiest city in England from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, its assay office (1562-1705) was comparatively shortlived. As such, secular silver produced in the city rarely appears on the market.

Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) is currently selling across a number of auctions a cache of items from the family of HG Murphy (1884-1939), whose Falcon Studio produced some of the finest English silver of the inter-war era.

The Royal Horticultural Society’s 65-acre gardens in a north Devon valley form the fragrant floral backdrop for Devon County Antiques Fairs’ quarterly two-day antiques and collectors’ events.

Comprising some 3000 books ranging in date from 1473-1840, one of the finest collections of books on agriculture ever assembled was dispersed by Forum Auctions (30/24/14.4% buyer’s premium inc VAT) in a July 10-11 sale that totalled £1.6m.

The so-called de minimis rule – the requirement to register items containing less than 10% of ivory prior to sale – has been criticised in the House of Lords as the ivory bill continues its progress through parliament.