UK

WEST Country-based organiser Sue Ede of Cooper Antiques Fairs is having a busy summer, even if her last couple of fairs, the first Oxford County Antiques Fair and the established North Cotswolds Antiques and Decorative Fair, were quieter than she would have liked.

OPENING with a grand private preview on June 8, and continuing until June 15, for the 70th year the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair will run at The Great Room of the Grosvenor House hotel on Mayfair’s Park Lane. And, no doubt, it will show, once again, why it is the country’s top fair and one of the world’s top antiques events.

MAYFAIR antiquities dealer Rupert Wace is mounting possibly the most captivating June selling exhibition when, as one of the participants of the first London Sculpture Week, he presents Pharaoh’s Creatures: Animals from Ancient Egypt, at 14 Old Bond Street, London W1.

SMALLER, more modest events, I am sure, benefit from the big fairs in town. Visitors to the Hali fair, for example, may well find the London Antique Textiles, Tribal Art and Decorative Antiques Fair on Sunday June 6 at Hammersmith Town Hall in King Street, London W6 to their liking.

THE Ephemera Society holds its Summer Special Fair at Le Meridien Russell Hotel, Russell Square in London’s Bloomsbury on Sunday June 13. Expect more than 100 tables covered with greetings cards, newspapers, magazines, autographs, playbills, menus and all manner of paper collectables.

LONG before Heineken, Allsopp & Sons’ Burton ale had a claim to be the beer which reached the parts other beers could not reach – bottles of it accompanied Sir George Strong Nares’ expedition attempting to reach the South Pole in 1875.

EXPECTED to sell for £1m or more at Sotheby’s on June 22 is the Macclesfield Psalter, an unrecorded illuminated manuscript, made in England in the early 14th century, that came to light only when the saleroom was asked to sell the contents of the 18th century library of the Earls of Macclesfield at Shirburn Castle.

I CAN almost hear the grinding as dozens of art critics hone their sabres – it must be time for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition!

GIVEN the bob-a-long prices for run-of-the-mill furniture at auction, the fact that 917 offerings at Lawrences of Bletchingley's (12.5% buyer's premium) 2861-lot April 27-29 sale were furniture didn’t bode well for the three-day outing.

INCREASINGLY, London is showing its teeth as one of the world’s nuclei for international Contemporary art. And, with last week’s opening of two substantial commercial art galleries, its status is going only one way – upwards.

WITH London’s Master Drawings week looming in July, specialist dealers were predictably out in force to contest this long-lost François Boucher (1703-1770) drawing which re-emerged at the Oxford rooms of Mallams (15% buyer’s premium) on May 7.

CONDITION is nine-tenths of the law in toy collecting and that explains the remarkable level of interest in this No.2 Special Pullman train set, pictured right, which turned up at Bonhams Edinburgh (17.5% buyer premium) on March 25.

DESPITE the well-documented vagaries of the silver and electroplate market, if vendors can forget the price history of the previous two decades it is still possible to hold a successful sale of country house tablewares.

ALTHOUGH many of the items on offer by the nine dealers taking part in London Sculpture Week (June 10-18) are antique, with some dating back more than 5000 years, there will be a few contemporary pieces.

FOLLOWING relegation, the on-running saga of Leeds United’s finances no doubt will mean that the club will end up selling more of their players over the summer. However, spare a thought for Crouch End Vampires F.C., one of the longest established amateur football clubs, that literally ended up selling the family silver at Bonhams Bath (17.5% buyer premium) back on March 15.

THE market’s mood for the earliest English porcelain was in evidence at the April 27 sale held by Brettells (12% buyer’s premium) of Newport. The Shropshire firm offered a 16-lot private collection of mainly Worcester wares.

AN April 29 sale held by Bloomsbury Auctions presented an enormous selection of children’s, illustrated and private press books that ran to nearly 900 lots. While there was much to admire in the other sections of the sale, I shall concentrate on the children’s books for this report. A great many of the lots came from one fine collection in which many of the books contained a bookplate designed by Pauline Baynes.

WILD beasts, and tigers in particular, loomed large in the late Georgian imagination. They appear in a range of guises, from the fearful symmetry of William Blake’s Tyger to the almost cuddly features of the big cats modelled by Staffordshire potters for popular consumption.

THE organisers of the Newark International Antiques and Collectors’ Fair say more than 100 dealers have taken them up on an offer of a 50 per cent price break for those who do not currently stand at the giant fair.

“The best example I have seen in the last ten years,” said Woolley and Wallis’ decorative arts specialist Michael Jeffery, of this Martinware bird, which was consigned to the auctioneers’ May 26 sale from a vendor in the New Forest.