UK

THE recently published, enlarged and revised second edition of Peter McEwan’s indispensable Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture describes the Perthshire-born landscape painter Joseph Henderson (1832-1908) as “one of Scotland’s half-forgotten painters who deserves better recognition than he has hitherto received”.

WHAT is billed as the first ever selling exhibition of early Armenian art to be held in a commercial gallery will be mounted by Sam Fogg at 15d Clifford Street, London W1, from September 22 to October 15.

PEAK District dealers Peter and Sonia Allerston also provide an interior design service from their premises at Elmton, Derbyshire. Now they have combined the two areas to take their own show on the road to drum up business.

SOME weeks ago, I reported that preparations were going well for Robert Bailey’s 54th annual Northern Antiques Fair which this year leaves Harrogate and moves to, arguably, the most prestigious venue in the county, Harewood House, near Leeds, stately home of Lord and Lady Harewood.

THE backbone of Bonhams’ September 3 car sale at Goodwood Motor Circuit in Sussex was the little-known but highly impressive collection of the late George Milligen.

WHILE Brian Haughton celebrates the botanical beauties of fine Chelsea, an altogether more prosaic, but nonetheless interesting, ceramic encounter is under scrutiny in Kensington Church Street.

REGULAR readers of Scott Reyburn’s Art Market will be only too aware that many equestrian paintings by Sir Alfred James Munnings (1878-1959) have in recent years shown significant increases in value. As he reported as recently as Antiques Trade Gazette No 1648, July 17, Munnings’ oil sketch Newmarket Cheveley was the only work to dramatically exceed its estimate in Sotheby’s Important British Picture sale on July 1.

IT IS ten years since well-known dealer Richard Gardner moved into Petworth, West Sussex. Today, even in a town known internationally as one of the most notable concentrations of antiques trading in the South of England, Mr Gardner can certainly be said to have made his mark.

AFTER two and a half years of exile from organising (following the sale of Cooper Antiques Fairs to Sue Ede) Reg Cooper, is delighted to be back on the scene.

CHELSEA antiques centre Antiquarius has been looking a bit tired of late but its new manager Neil Jackson is determined to put the pep back into the enterprise, which was launched at 131-141 King’s Road, SW3 in 1970 by antiques market pioneer Bennie Gray and is now owned by Atlantic Antiques Centres.

ANTIQUES never have a low profile in Harrogate, but over the next few weeks they will dominate the North Yorkshire town with three fairs in the vicinity and the numerous antiques shops and galleries making a special effort to impress the autumn visitors, traditionally many of them antiques tourists.

A DEALER from Melbourne, Australia was one of the first through the doors, and certainly the most welcome visitor at Caroline Penman’s first Bury St. Edmunds Antiques Fair, held at the Athenaeum in the Suffolk market town from September 3 to 5.

SOME provincial auctioneers and London’s major houses batten down their hatches during the traditionally dead month of August, but for Scarborough Perry (15% buyer's premium) it was business as usual for their August 12-13 sale.

THE Rates of Merchandise, that is to say, Subsidy of Tonnage, ...Poundage and ...Woollen Clothes, or Old-Drapery, as they are Rated and Agreed on by the Commons House of Parliament..., a 1660 copy in rebacked contemporary calf of the book of rates required by the passing of that year’s Act of Tonnage and Poundage, was sold for £1000 in a Bloomsbury Auctions sale of June 17.

Right: sold for £4200 in the July 21 sale held by Lyon & Turnbull at Jordanstone, an Ayrshire country house, was Rowlandson’s The Comforts of Bath, a set of a dozen prints issued by Fores in 1798, and here loosely inserted in an album of full red crushed morocco.

OMENS could not be better for the 20/21 British Art Fair, which, from September 15 to 19, returns to its roots at the Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 after a couple of years down the road at The Commonwealth Institute.

SOLD for £30,000 at Bonhams on July 15 (as part of the big natural history sale) was a rare series of six mid-18th century engravings dealing with the training of racehorses.

INNOVATIVE Oxfordshire dealers The Country Seat may be best known as furniture specialists, but they are increasingly turning their focus towards 19th and 20th century design.

PLENTY of art and antiques on offer around the capital this month but the imaginative Mayfair tribal art specialists the Gordon Reece Gallery have come up with a different take on the decorative, with a selling exhibition they hold at 16 Clifford Street, London W1 until October 2.

RIGHT: though I suspected a sub-text, this black letter broadside, printed “at London in the Olde Baily by Richard Lant for Thomas Porefut in Paules Churchyard at the sygne of Lucrese”, seems to offer a straightforward account (in a translation by Renolde Olyver) of a violent storm and consequent disasters that took place at Mechlin [Malines], near Antwerp, in August 1546.