UK

Two of the strongest performances in the December ceramics sales came from the glass sections offered at Bonhams Bond Street on December 8 and at Sotheby’s Olympia two weeks later.

Four antique clocks and two barometers were stolen in a raid on Chislehurst Antiques in Kent in late December.

Hamptons Fine Art Auctioneers have become the latest regional auction business to join The Fine Art Auction Group, parent company of Dreweatt Neate Fine Art and Neales of Nottingham.

BACK in London, until February 12, Mayfair purveyors of ethnographic and tribal items, the Gordon Reece Gallery, hold a sale of their current stock of antique rugs at their gallery at 16 Clifford Street, London W1. Rugs are offered at half price and, in true High Street clearance style, will be replaced daily “while stocks last”.

By and large the Cumbrian antiques trade were counting their blessings last week after escaping the worst of the floods that engulfed the region.

The Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum have added two paintings by Joseph Southall (1861-1944) to their internationally recognised collection of British Arts & Crafts.

The Victoria and Albert Museum will open a new Portrait Miniatures Gallery on March 2.

SOME areas of the art market seem impervious to the changing winds of taste. One is quality pictures of great European cities by recognised artists which appeal across the usual boundaries of generations and national borders.

Wallis & Wallis, Lewes. November 23. Buyer’s premium: 15 per centSales of arms and militaria can, with their beautifully chased old flintlocks and exuberantly decorated uniforms, somehow skate over the fact that often what is on offer is, or was, associated with the darker side of humanity.

ERICH Maria Remarque’s corrected galley proofs for the 1929, first bookform edition of Im Westen nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] brought a collector’s bid of £26,000 at Sotheby’s on November 30.

NOW a permanent fixture on the capital’s art scene, the seventh annual Art on Paper Fair will be held from February 3 to 6 at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7. It will be opened at noon on the 3rd by one of last year’s more colourful characters, Spectator editor, and lapsed Tory shadow spokesman for the Arts, Boris Johnson.

The 1150 lots offered at Essex auctioneers Ambrose (15% buyer’s premium) at Loughton on December 9 encompassed most areas of the market and, outside the jewellery, generally sold for three-figure sums.

Clarke Gammon Wellers, Guildford, October 26. Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent Although there were few four-figure highlights in this 711-lot outing, the 100-lot jewellery section had just the type of reasonably estimated, privately entered, material to attract dealers from London and the South East who, between them, secured the lion’s share of entries.

The Orient played a significant part in Tennants’ (Buyers premium 15%) success in the Yorkshire Dales.

The main head-turner at the Hove sale held by Scarborough Perry Fine Arts (15% buyer’s premium) on December 2-3 was this striking 19th century Italian, gold-mounted tortoiseshell snuffbox with a finely executed micromosaic lid, right.

Richardson & Smith, Whitby, November 18 Buyer’s premium: 12.5 per cent Furniture produced the top lots in this routine 717-lot North Yorkshire auction, topped by an oak dresser and a plate rack with a shaped crest over four tiers.

IN CONTRAST to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, who usually offer Japanese arms and armour in Japanese works of art sales, Bonhams (19.5/10% buyers premium) include theirs as a section in militaria auctions.

Despite a year that saw no recovery in prices for brown furniture and problematic levels of demand for ‘bread and butter’ pictures and table silver, several of the UK’s top provincial auctioneers enjoyed record turnover figures in 2004.

ANDREW McIntosh Patrick, director of The Fine Art Society, is to sell his celebrated collection of metalwork by the Victorian industrial designer Christopher Dresser. Edinburgh auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull will conduct the projected £400,000 sale on April 19.

THE V&A has appealed for help from the art and antiques world in tracing the eight bronze plaques thought to be worth a total of £450,000 stolen in the third raid on the museum in three months.