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ALTHOUGH Oriental pieces were the main strength of Woolley & Wallis’s (15% buyer's premium) quarterly specialist ceramics sale on February 25, there was also evidence of the continued strength of the market for unusual examples of early English porcelain.

“Probably the best sale of this type in a very long time. Very strong across the board,” enthused specialist Roy Bolton after his February 27 auction of Old Master Pictures at Christie’s South Kensington (17.5/10% buyers premium).

WITH collectors’ taste in Modern British art shifting in recent years from pre-war to post-war, the once all-conquering Newlyn School has not generated as many headline-stealing results as it did in the late 1980s.

A LONG-ESTABLISHED and popular Belgian fixture is Eurantica, a stylish fair which runs from March 19 to 28 in Palais 1 of Brussels Expo, a stone’s throw from that famous Brussels landmark the Atomium.

THESE are heady times for fairgoers, what with Maastricht, major events in New York and the BADA and Olympia in London. But life goes on, and thrives, nearer the all-important grass roots.

Setting a new house record at Carmarthen auctioneers Peter Francis on March 9 was this 18th century Coromandel Coast marquetry inlaid padouk, ebony and ivory chest of five short and two long drawers.

Signed and inscribed by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this short poem called ‘Fancy in the Clouds: a Marine Sonnet’ was written on a piece of seaweed and sent to Charles Lamb.