UK

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.

Cheap sterling can help bring in the foreign buyers – but only if auctioneers can deliver the right goods. These were much in evidence at Chorley’s (20% buyer’s premium) sale at Prinknash Abbey on September 13-14.

The president of NAVA Propertymark has promised to increase the membership of the auctioneer and valuer association during his tenure and reiterated his quest to get more auctioneers registered.

A pair of watercolours depicting Berwick-upon-Tweed, the northern-most town in England, turned up at Batemans (20% buyer’s premium) on September 2.

A nude painting by the 19th century English artist William Etty (1787-1849) starred in Sworders’ (22% buyer’s premium) sale in Essex. The 2ft 2in x 19in (66 x 49cm) oil on panel shows a naked woman in a wooded landscape, her head and body turned away from the viewer.

At the Ink Fair London on October 25-27, Susanne Sculz-Falster Rare Books offers this collection of 241 butterfly and moth prints housed in a 22-drawer collector’s cabinet, right, for £7500.

“If you lived here you could make it absolutely divine,” wrote author Virginia Woolf to her sister Vanessa Bell in 1916.

A portrait of air vice-marshal James Edgar ‘Johnnie’ Johnson has been donated to the RAF Club in London after being sold by dealer MacConnal-Mason.

West Hall, located on the outskirts of Long Burton a few miles south of Sherborne, is an imposing stone-built manor house. The ancient iron-studded front door still bears the axe marks made by Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads in the English Civil War as they tried to beat down the door. They suspected Charles I may have been hiding inside.

One of the most sought-after models in the jukebox world is the Wurlitzer Peacock Type 850, designed by Paul Fueller in 1941. It is generally considered the biggest, the showiest and ‘most jukeboxy’ jukebox of them all.

The first book sale of the new season at Sotheby’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) dispersed the travel library of John and Suzanne Bonham, well-known specialist dealers in the British and international antiquarian book trade.