Art and antiques news from 2006

2007 fixture will be cut to three days

PHILLIPS de Pury & Company are to open a new London saleroom and hold a special Contemporary Art and Design auction on October 14 during the Frieze fair.

LESS than two months remains to find the final £116,057 towards the £1.4m price of a unique portrait of the 17th century poet John Donne.

SOTHEBY’s have hit back at claims that investors are losing confidence in the art market despite the company’s biggest shareholder selling their entire stake.

It gives some idea as to how furniture connoisseurship has changed that the upholstered high-back chair pictured here could once have been accepted as an original furnishing from the bedroom of Mary Queen of Scots.

All Bank of England banknotes issued prior to the early 1800s are rare but the note, pictured here, dated 30 August 1705, is believed to be the oldest in private hands.

THE Office of Fair Trading are to conduct a survey of internet shopping habits and will report their findings next spring.

Long-time Kent auctioneer Mervyn Carey is to retire after more than four decades in the business. He held his last sale at the church hall in Tenterden last Wednesday.

EBAY have posted first quarter net revenues of $1.39bn, just over predictions and 35 per cent up on the first quarter of 2005.

SWIFT-Find, the international registry of valuable items, have bought the Trace stolen valuables database from the Invaluable Group.

Art London moves from its summer slot to autumn and also changes location for its eighth staging.

AS ATG went to press, the price of silver appeared to be steadying following the dramatic fall seen late last week.

A Bedford woman who was downsizing homes decided to enter this piece of family silver into her local auction house. It proved to be the stellar entry in W&H Peacock’s April 7 antiques sale when, after generating considerable pre-sale attention from the London silver trade, it far outstripped the saleroom’s unpublished expectations of around £3000-5000, selling to one of their number for £28,000 (plus 12.5% premium).

MUSSOLINI’s son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, would have done well to heed the imagery of this black glazed terracotta head when another version of it came into his possession.

...but Web provider still won’t budge on credit card charges

THE Australian government has acted to protect indigenous artists following media reports that exposed exploitation and corruption in the Aboriginal art world.

Essex centre to be environmentally friendly

The current boom in the market for Chinese Contemporary paintings could hardly be better illustrated than by the way sale statistics have been leapfrogging around the globe in the last couple of weeks.

The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors are launching a new booklet to help inexperienced buyers and sellers at auction.

Works by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) are only very occasionally seen on the market. So when this evocative watercolour Salt Marsh was offered at Sworders (15% buyer’s premium) sale in Stansted Mountfitchet on April 11 it attracted at least seven interested parties.