Antiques Trade Gazette 17

Above: Keswick School of Industrial Art silver tea caddy – £4000 at Mitchells of Cockermouth.

Western and North Eastern specialists saw top bids of £820 for an album of nearly 400 views of Cumbrian towns and villages and £750 for one of about 500 illustrating Cumbrian and North Northumberland views. More surprising was the way private buyers fought over Mr Hall’s Victorian brass oil lamps. Thirteen of these lamps were offered in ten lots and, as they can be picked up in almost any antiques market, were expected to total between £840 and £1250. In the event, led by a 2ft 33

/4 in (70cm) column lamp, with

cranberry and clear glass shade, cranberry reservoir and black glass base, which trebled expectations at £480, they all sold at retail-plus prices and totalled £2790. The Hall factor may have helped in some sections but his estate’s contribution to the silver was just 30 out of 116 lots, yet here, too, 90 per cent of the offerings sold. It was mainly standard fare bringing two- and three-figure sums but a specialist item with local connections brought serious competition.

This was a Keswick School of Industrial Arts, 16oz tea caddy, Chester 1912, bearing the script signature R. Temple and

the verse: This casket of dead leaves shall bring/ Each morn new thoughts awakening.

Decorated with birds in flight and Art Nouveau scrollwork, the caddy had been on the market about three years ago but, rather than counting against it,this made it the more desirable among people who remembered it. Relatively small quantities of silver were made at KSIA and this

In pearlware or embroidery, for bidders these were the cat’s whiskers...

TWO very different but undoubtedly pedigree cats. Pictured above left is a 13in (33cm) high – and therefore near life-size – Scottish pearlware model of a seated cat with a striped green mottled body and maroon collar. With only a chip to the left ear to count against it, this mid-19th century feline was among the highlights of the sale conducted by Bonhams (20% buyer’s premium)from the Athenaeum in Bury St Edmunds on March 3-4. Estimated at £500-700, it pushed on to £3200. The 10in (25cm) high hand embroidered cat pictured above

right would have attracted little attention had it not been for a letter of authentication from the artist, Mary Fedden (b.1915). Worked in steel blue velvet with black, blue and white stitching, it is evidently quite a rarity for an artist whose painted output includes many a moggie. At the Wisborough

example, estimated at £2000-3000, sold to a local collector who was pushed all the way by interest from Oxford and the South to a winning bid of £4000. The 150-lot works of art section at Cockermouth was, not unexpectedly led by a c.1910 ivory and breche violette marble figure of a semi-nude girl half draped in flowing clothes. Standing 14in (35.5m) tall she went to the trade well over estimate at £3800. The talking point, however, was the battles for two Austrian cold-painted bronzes in the Orientalist taste. One, 8in (20cm) tall, of a woman handing a water pitcher to a camel rider was by Franz Bergmann. The other a 9in (23cm) tall group of an Arab raising a stick to encourage a performing monkey on a donkey’s back was catalogued as ‘probably by Bergmann’. Auctioneer Mark Wise, who had estimated each at £500-800, described their condition as ‘minty’.

In both cases it was the same private collector who outbid a Cumbrian dealer with winning bids of £3300. Bergmann’s bronzes do seem strong at the moment. On March 16 a woodcock in as-new condition took £3200 at Woolley & Wallis’s Salisbury sale (see ATG1934, dated April 3).

Left: Bergmann cold-painted bronze – £3300 at Mitchells, Cockermouth.

Mitchells, Cockermouth, March 25-26

Number of lots offered: 1465 Number of lots sold: 80 per cent Buyer’s premium: 20 per cent (inc Vat)

Sale total: £364,000

Above: embroidered cat by Mary Fedden – £1000 at Bellmans. Left: life-size Scottish pearlware cat – £3200 at Bonhams in Bury St Edmunds.

Green saleroom Bellmans (20% buyer’s premium) on March 17-19, it sold at the lower end of a £1000-1500 estimate. The unexpected highpoint of this mammoth three-day West Sussex sale was provided by a George III dwarf bookcase cabinet of unusual form comprising a pair of astragal glazed doors above five herringbone inlaid drawers. It measured just 3ft 2in (97cm) wide and stood just shy of 4ft 11in (1.50m) high – commercial dimensions indeed – but, after storage in a shed, it was in poor condition. The auctioneers thought it worth just £80-120 as a

restoration project but they became aware it would exceed this after it attracted the attention of one of London’s top dealers. It brought £3000.

Roland Arkell

42 tiggy

Above: HMS Victory Sea Service pistol with detail of the revealing butt, right – £3000 at Dreweatts in Bristol.

It was just an everyday sea pistol – but...

IN many ways, a 25-bore arsenal- shortened flintlock ’long’ Sea Service pistol offered by Dreweatts (20% buyer’s premium) at their Medals & Militaria sale in Bristol on March 23, was a regulation firearm c.1800. It carried a crowned GR and a Tower

mark across the tail and the Board of Ordnance mark to the full stock, but it acquired a special significance when an inspection of the brass butt-cap revealed the inscription H.M.S. Victory. The number 37engraved to the reverse and the absence of a belt clip suggests that the pistol was housed in a rack space in a ship’s armoury.

This enigmatic pistol – there are

apparently no comparable survivors – was last on the market in 1971 when it was bought by the husband of the vendor in Portugal. It was off Spain and Portugal where Victorysaw four active years of service after she was recommissioned in March 1808.

Given the lack of an early provenance for this weapon, it was a difficult piece to estimate but Dreweatts were able to offer it at a buyable £1500-2000. It did not fly but it made £3000.

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