Scotland

Manufacturing expertise and a fondness for the hard stuff are notable traits among Scottish folk, and they were well married in this miniature copper whisky still, pictured, offered by Glasgow auctioneers McTear’s (10 per cent buyer’s premium) on September 11.

Sotheby’s annual jaunt north of the border to Gleneagles is as traditional to the Scottish leg of the ‘Season’ as the Oban ball and the first flexing of the Duke of Edinburgh’s trigger finger on the moors above Balmoral.

AT the second outing Antiques For Everyone – Glasgow confirmed its status as Scotland’s top fair and certainly enough business was achieved by enough of the 170 exhibitors at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre to indicate a secure future for this new fixture.

AS in Edinburgh, strong private bidding for local favourites dominated the picture section of Andrew Hartley’s (10% buyer’s premium) August 15 sale in well-heeled Ilkley, West Yorkshire.

The estate of the widow of Professor H.B. Acton, a former Professor of Philosophy at Edinburgh University, provided the Scottish and Cumbrian auctioneers Thomson Roddick & Medcalf (15% buyer’s premium) with an attractive group of 20 Modern British lots to put before bidders at The Royal Scots Club in Edinburgh on July 25.

UK: After months of speculation as to whether Tim Clifford might be able to secure a private treaty purchase on behalf of the National Galleries of Scotland, Michelangelo’s (1475-1564) pen and ink Study of a Mourning Woman finally came under the hammer at Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) July 11 Old Master drawings sale with an estimate of £5-7m.

THE local west Scottish trade were the driving force behind the 75 per cent take-up on the 589 lots offered at Mctear's. Glasgow on June 15 – including the surprise star piece.

While Lyon & Turnbull enjoyed the lion’s share of the audience for the two sales in Edinburgh at the end of June, Phillips (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) at least had the most surprising result in the form of this Tunbridgeware sewing/writing table by Fenner and Co., estimated at £300-500.

Robin Day shot to fame as the winner of MoMA’s international low-cost furniture competition in 1948, but the bidding for a pair of Forum Lounge chairs, one shown, in the Post-War section of the sale at Phillips Edinburgh (15% buyer’s premium) on April 27 was anything but subdued.

Silver spirit labels (‘Holland’ refers to Dutch Gin) are not quite two a penny, but they are among the cheapest drinking trinkets available.

UK: SALES catering for specific collectors’ markets are steadily increasing in the provincial rooms with the Scottish arm of the LVMH empire.

UK: ILLUSTRATED here is a plan of Aberdeen, one of 47 double-page engraved or litho plans (some folding) from a copy of John Wood’s Town Atlas of Scotland of 1818-26, rebound in modern boards, which sold for £2800 in the Lyon & Turnbull sale of February 17.

UK: THERE is a distinctly nervous look about the Dodo pictured here, as befits a creature staring extinction in the beak. This “Facsimile of [Roelandt] Savery’s picture of the Dodo in the Royal Gallery at Berlin” is a plate from H.E. Strickland & A.G. Melville’s The Dodo and its Kindred; or the History, Affinities and Osteology of the Dodo, Solitaire and other Extinct Birds of the islands Mauritius, Rodriguez and Bourbon.

UK: THE copy of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom offered by Lyon & Turnbull of Edinburgh on February 17 was one of the 170 or so signed, “complete” copies of the privately printed, subscribers’ edition of 1926 and in the original brown morocco binding, illustrated here.

UK: THE 122-lot furniture section at this Glasgow general sale was something of a double-edged claymore supplying, as it did, the biggest prices as well as the most casualties.

UK: A SUBSTANTIAL offering of furniture, most of it 19th century and brown, received a mixed response from the Scottish and North of England trade at the last Phillips sale in Edinburgh before Christmas.

UK: ONE CHART was very creased and there was a stain on the frontispiece that penetrated to the title page and early leaves, but the copy of Bligh’s Narrative of the Mutiny on [the...] Bounty offered in Carlisle was a tightly bound copy of the 1790 first edition in a contemporary binding of quarter calf and marbled boards, and it sold at £3150.

UK: LOCAL bidders accounted for most of the Oriental and European ceramics and works of art offered at Edinburgh where 306 lots totalled £75,000 but the top seller went to an English bidder.

In these days of raging prices for anything remotely decorative in the world of antiques, it is not often that you find something early, unusual and pleasing to the eye for little more than £500.

UK: The unexpected crowd puller at Lyon & Turnbull’s 509-lot sale on October 8 was this Wanli period (1573-1619) Chinese blue and white ewer estimated at £400-500