UK

SOTHEBY’S Bond Street (20/12% buyer’s premium) took their first tentative step into the world of 20th century Asian art on May 6 with a 173-lot mixed-owner dispersal of Chinese, Japanese and Korean paintings, prints, posters, sculpture and ceramics on May 6.

SCATTERED amongst the colourfully decorated but fairly routine European-taste 18th century famille verte and famille rose bowls, plates and tea services that comprised the bulk of Christie’s King Street’s (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) 214-lot European collection of Chinese Export ceramics on May 11 was a handful of more unusual entries for which buyers paid a premium.

THE way Bonhams’ (17.5% buyer's premium) empire has adapted to the received wisdom that specialisation is a key to today’s macro auction environment is to have niche markets catered for at different outposts. Among the areas catered for at the Midlands branch at Knowle are such widely known ones as mechanical music and railwayana and, in ascending degree of arcane nature, wireless sets, optical instruments, firemarks, truncheons and tipstaffs.

For 30 years, the props that have given authenticity to many of viewers’ beloved TV and movie costume dramas, have been supplied by West London specialists Period Props & Lighting.

MANY of the top lots among the 725 offered at Clarke Gammon Wellers' (15% buyer's premium) April 20 sale came from the owner of an elegant local flat – including a William IV mahogany longcase.

AT the beginning of September John Eskenazi, one of the leading dealers in Indian, Tibetan and South-East Asian art, will leave his gallery at 15 Old Bond Street, London W1 and deal by appointment only.

THE vicar of St Thomas the Apostle in Hanwell is appealing to dealers to look out for an altar cross stolen from the West London parish church on May 20.

IF you’ve walked through the glazed doors at Bonhams in Bond Street in the last month, you can’t have failed to notice the major effects of the six-month facelift to the premises. The international headquarters are now up and running with only a few finishing touches left to be made.

LITTLE wonder that London organisers Brian and Anna Haughton have such a soft spot for their annual International Ceramics Fair & Seminar, the 23rd of which will be staged from June 10 to 13 at The Commonwealth Centre in Kensington High Street, London W8.

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.