UK

Glasgow saleroom Mulberry Bank will offer a late 18th century Qing famille rose bottle vase with an estimate of £1.5m-2m in its October 20-21 auction.

Update (July 2019): auctions resumed at Bloomsbury in 2018 following Gurr Johns' purchase of Dreweatts and Bloomsbury in 2017. In February 2019 it expanded the number of sales at its London office at 16-17 Pall Mall. The original story is below.

Anthony Browne, chairman of The British Art Market Federation (BAMF), was due to meet with environment secretary Michael Gove this week (October 10) to discuss the proposed ban on sales of ivory in the UK.

Modern sculpture, including a small rediscovered marine ivory piece by Eric Gill (1882-1940), took centre stage at Duke’s (22% buyer’s premium) in Dorset.

Trading as Hoof Brocante, Adrian Higham is among the most genial of men.

It’s taken more than a year to materialise but at last, the long-awaited consultation on ivory has arrived.

Hansons Auctioneers in Etwall, Derbyshire sold a Yongzheng (1723-35) mark and period dish for £230,000 (plus premium) on September 29.

Part of a consignment from a deceased estate in Totnes, this stoneware bowl by red-hot studio pottery favourite Dame Lucie Rie was a near certainty to exceed the £6000-9000 estimate when Chudleigh auction house Michael J Bowman (17.5% buyer’s premium) received a £20,000 commission bid from Japan ahead of the September 23 Devon sale.

A letter billed as one of the most important items of ephemera from the Titanic to be offered at auction will go under the hammer at Henry Aldridge & Son on October 21 in Devizes, Wiltshire.

John Alexander (1686-1766) was the son of a doctor in Aberdeen and the great-grandson of the famous artist George Jamesone.

“Only a Rizla paper between them,” is what judge Philip Arnold declared as he announced the winner of the 2017 NAVA Propertymark Novice Auctioneer of the year.

An unusual medals sale has led to an unusual outcome. An application is to be made to export from Canada the Victoria Cross group won by heroic Lieutenant Colonel David Currie after it was bought by a British private collector.

A collection of early 20th century Chinese silver attracted wide interest at Catherine Southon’s (18% buyer’s premium) September 6 sale at Selsdon, south London.

Ed Lake works at Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, specialist in 18th and 19th century English literature and history. His parents opened the business in 1969 and it is based in Great Russell Street, across from the British Museum. The shop’s ground floor has been renovated to recreate a 19th-century bookshop.

Leading UK artists have donated works for an auction raising funds to establish a national centre for the artist Thomas Gainsborough.

This original case of five silver catheters and three urethral sounds marked for the London maker J Millikan might be a strange offering as a prize outside medical circles.

Early on at the recent LAPADA Art & Antiques Fair (15-20 September), Charles Wallrock of Wick Antiques met a new client.