Art and antiques news from 2005

NEWS too, of confident moves in the fine art trade. After a career in the London art world spanning some 45 years, Martin Summers has, just after his 66th birthday, set up his own gallery and dealership, Martin Summers Fine Art Ltd, at 54 Glebe Place in Chelsea.

THE memory of a long-ago, short-lived trade agreement between England and France was rekindled by an extraordinary embroidered waistcoat that surfaced in the Deburaux & Associés sale in Paris on February 11, when it sold to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for €5000 (£3470) plus 20.33% buyer’s premium.

If a silhouette was going to set a new auction record then this elaborately embellished, highly decorative and grandiose royal subject was surely a good candidate. When it sold for £9500 (plus 20 per cent premium) at Bonhams on February 22, it beat the auctioneers’ own previous auction high of £8000 set last year by a Torond conversation piece.

THE future of the United States’ trade in Chinese works of art remains in limbo following a Washington committee hearing to debate a possible ban on imports.

THE ATG online price guide has notched up more than 500,000 individual prices for items sold at auction.

Alex Neish is to donate a small collection of Judaica to a museum at the recently excavated and restored 12th century synagogue in Barcelona.

INCLUDED in Potburys’ (12.5% buyer’s premium) sale in Sidmouth, Devon on February 8 and 9 was a 75-lot collection of pictures by the Orientalist painter Charles Robertson (1844-91) consigned from his granddaughter’s estate. They appear to have been the works that remained in the family after the artist’s Godalming studio was sold off following his death from a heart attack aged 47.

The Fine Art Auction Group, parent company of Dreweatt Neate Fine Art and Neales of Nottingham, will be the major sponsor of the Art of Dealing conference at the Earls Court Conference Centre in London on May 16.

A POSSIBLE hike in import VAT linked to works of art sold in the UK is not the threat some fear, says British Art Market Federation chairman Anthony Browne.

NOW in its 13th year, the BADA Antiques & Fine Art Fair has become not just an established but a highly regarded fixture on the British quality fairs scene.

A group of 19th century sepia drawings, depicting Aborigines in Queensland, came up for auction at Brightwells (15% buyer’s premium) sale of paintings and prints on January 26 in Leominster, Herefordshire.

The annual Paris Salon du Dessin will showcase 30 of the world’s premier drawings specialists at the Palais de la Bourse in Paris from March 16-21.

PRESENTER and interviewer Jeremy Paxman, pictured right, has agreed to be the patron of this year’s Antiquarian Book Fair, which will be held at Olympia in West London from June 9 to 12.

The market for Clarice Cliff may not be the spirited beast it was five or six years ago when Christie’s South Kensington’s specialist sales could routinely expect to boast 80-90 per cent selling rates by lot.

Publicity worked well in the Lyon & Turnbull sale for Golf in the Year 2000, or What are We Coming To..., a work of 1892 by J.A.C.K.

David Lay, Penzance. January 20 & 21. Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent THERE were rather fewer lots than usual at Cornwall but the 720 on offer were true to tradition; a high take up (around 90 per cent), plenty of two- and three-figure bids on collectables and ceramics, standard furniture creeping into four figures, and one lot taking off.

Valued at £1500-2000, a signed first issue of William Blacker’s The Art of Angling..., printed in 1842 in Edinburgh by Anderson & Bryce and containing 31 trout flies and a single salmon fly attached with decorative coloured paper seals (see illustration top right) but lacking the single plate, was bid to £22,000 (Head).

Brightwells, Leominster, January 12-13 Buyer’s premium: 15 per cent Illuminating this 900-lot Hereford-shire sale was the English brass candlestick featured on the front page of ATG No.1675, February 5, which was taken to £4600 in the confident belief it was a period 16th century example.

Pot Lids and Stevengraphs were two areas of the market put to the test last month.

LAST week I reported how Kensington porcelain specialist Simon Spero was moving following the termination of his lease.