UK

A leading CITES lawyer is warning that UK auctioneers and dealers risk hefty fines due to widespread confusion over the rules controlling the sale of antique ivory.

Boningtons Auctioneers will become the first regional auction house to offer original works by Winston Churchill at a sale in July.

Fine Art Exchange (FAX), an online peer-to-peer marketplace for pictures, has launched with Cork Street dealer Johnny Messum as a partner.

Bill Jones is a seasoned dealer in Art Deco and Arts & Crafts but a newcomer to the world of organising fairs, an arena into which he has thrown himself recently with gusto.

Another firm has been fined for breaching CITES regulations. South Lanarkshire auctioneers LS Smellie and Son were fined £1500 earlier this month for offering three items of unworked ivory for sale last year.

New books and works on paper specialists Forum Auctions will hold their first London sale at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair on July 13-14.

A Scottish dealer whose stock and business went up in smoke has vowed to carry on with an online venture

While other rock stars were demolishing hotel rooms or setting their trousers and their instruments alight, Queen guitarist Brian May was busy buying Victorian photographs.

A private US collector spent £2.48m at Christie’s, acquiring all four of the early William Shakespeare folios on offer in a specially-staged auction.

The British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA) and the Antiquarian Booksellers Association (ABA) have announced plans to create a ‘memorandum of understanding’ between the two venerable trade bodies.

The owner of a new company operating High Road Auctions in Chiswick has told ATG he will be investing in the refurbishment of the premises and has already created escrow accounts to separate client’s money from day-to-day business expenses.

A rare Rolex Submariner took a record £160,000 plus buyer’s premium at a Gardiner Houlgate sale in Wiltshire on May 25.

Christie’s have announced that a major landscape by John Constable will be among the works on offer at their Defining British Art sale in London this summer.

The British Antique Dealers Association (BADA) is launching ‘BADA Voices,’ an oral history of the trade as the first of their 2018 centenary initiatives.

Royal Museums Greenwich are attempting to raise £10m to buy a version of The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I. The work currently belongs to descendants of Sir Francis Drake but the institution say that unless the required funds are raised, the painting “could be sold on the open market and even go overseas”.

A series of antique weapons were sold by Bonhams earlier this month missing their ivory elements after the items had been surrendered to the UK’s Border Force.

Classic car and motorcycle specialist H&H Classics is bringing in talent from outside the auction world to lead its next phase of development.

An early printed copy of the laws of rugby appeared at Rogers Jones in Cardiff as part of a themed sale titled Sweat, Mud & Blood. Auctioneer Ben Rogers Jones said: ”In 25 years of our business, it is the most valuable book we have sold and probably the smallest.”

Christie’s have admitted to “an honest and genuine mistake” by putting up for sale an ivory and kutch silver trophy that contravened CITES regulations.

Football Sport Auctions Limited, a Merseyside company specialising in auctioning football memorabilia, ceased trading in April owing large sums to a long list of consignors.