UK

Autumn has been the setting for so many specialist sales round the regions that an all-disciplines, quality sale such as that held by Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (21% buyer’s premium) at Exeter on October 3 was almost a rarity.

What expert James Opie described as “the most intriguing collection I have ever come across” provided Rochester auction house C&T (18% buyer’s premium) with its biggest statement yet in the toy soldiers market.

British and Irish watercolours piqued the interest of bidders at Tennants’ (18.5% buyer’s premium) Country House sale in Leyburn on October 14.

Pictured is a happy customer making a purchase at Arthur Swallow Fairs’ first monthly Monday winter drive-in indoor antiques market held in the Blackdown Building at the Stoneleigh Park Estate, near Coventry, in October.

The name on the frame was the name of the game at Charles Miller’s November 7 auction in west London where a “rather tired and dirty” sextant sold for £28,000.

Not many new faces at salerooms can include among their experience “a trained horse whisperer”.

The Department for International Trade (DIT) is to use its global influence to bring more art and antiques buyers to the UK.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Lists of artwork by Geoffrey Clarke (1924-2014) can read like a travelogue.

In business for 20-plus years, former Sotheby’s auctioneer Catherine Southon, founder of the eponymous auction house and antiques TV presenter, takes nothing for granted.

“I died in hell – they called it Passchendaele,” Siegfried Sassoon famously wrote of the First World War carnage which ended in November 1917.

In the little market town of Eye in Suffolk, English and Continental Antiques is preparing for its final exhibition of the year (starting November 18).

Cirencester auction house Moore Allen & Innocent will offer a cache of uncensored letters written by a prominent First World War officer.

A collection of market-fresh pictures with a distinctive Surrealist streak found favour with buyers at Charterhouse (21% buyer’s premium) in Dorset.

“No one can rival Thomas Cole for engraving in the 19th century,” said director Jamie South after this exhibition-quality carriage clock sold for £26,000 (plus 20% premium) at Gardiner Houlgate in Horsham, Bath, on October 25. It went to an American buyer towards the top end of the estimate.

Earlier works in an October 18 sale held by Cheffins (22.5% buyer’s premium) included a scarce 1688 first of Randle Holme’s The Academy of Armory, or a Storehouse of Armory and Blazon, an heraldic work by the third member of a distinguished Chester family of heraldic painters and genealogists to bear that name. It made £1200.

In our continuing series looking through the keyhole of ‘bricks and mortar’ shops in 2017, ATG talks to Glenn Lawrence of Harp and Rose Antiques, which opened in May 2013 and specialises in early English porcelain and ceramics. It also stocks period furniture, clocks, glass, jewellery and more.

As the annual Christmas-gift jamboree gets under way and exhibitors at fairs and markets across the UK bring out their best stock, all kinds of antique delights will be for sale this weekend in Oxfordshire from 40 mostly local dealers.

A mid-19th century scrimshaw carved whalebone walking cane sold for a house record of £17,000 (plus 18% buyer’s premium) at East Bristol Auctions on November 9.

Fitzroy Square to the north of central London was a key location in early 20th century British art. Virginia Woolf lived here for several years, a few doors down from Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan Grant, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler also had a studio.