News and Opinion — Year 2014

Giving a further useful buffer to its core decorative and fine arts exhibiting and auction business, Mossgreen Auctions will add about $3.5 million a year to its turnover if current trading levels from the newly acquired Prestige Philately are sustained.

Stamps and associated business would then account for more than 10 per cent of group operations at more than $30 million, writes Terry Ingram

Two old troopers from the allied fields of art and books put new life into the major annual event in the Australian antiques world-the Australian Antique and Art Dealers Association fair at the Chelsea Room at the Royal Randwick Race Course Randwick at the end of August, writes Terry Ingram.

A third old trooper also chipped in from across the years - if you count a familiar old major on an old canvas that was one of the 44 dealer fair show-stoppers. The portrait of Major James Winniett Nunn on the stand of Sydney Antiquarian bookseller Hordern House drew an almost constant visitation.

A precious link in the Australian saleroom has been broken with the death on August 17 2014, and after a long illness, of Bruce Rutherford.

What was conceivably the most prestigious sale held in Australia at the time – and possibly to this day – was held by Sotheby's  in 1973 four years after Rutherford's appointment as the firm's representative for Australia. 

If a Lotus land is an idyllic place of contentment as it is sometimes defined, Lawson's must have whisked a Sydney North Shore vendor away there on August 14 when it auctioned a bronze Buddha figure on that consignors behalf, in its rooms in Leichhardt, writes Terry Ingram

Classic antique furniture, porcelain, paintings, silver and glass will be a collectors’ paradise for auction goers when E.J. Ainger places the estate of the late Patricia Jackson under the hammer from noon Sunday August 3 on site at 52 St Georges Road, Toorak. 

Both Patricia Jackson, who died earlier this year aged 89, and her husband Gordon were well known for entertaining and collecting (his passion was Australian ceramics donated after his death to the Geelong Art Gallery in appreciation of his family’s long association with the city through Jackson Tanneries) and the home reflected her style and personality.

The market in rare Chinese antiques just won't lie down. A new auction record for Chinese furniture is now being claimed by Lawson's for a 17th century Ming/Qing love seat or day bed sold at a house contents auction it held in Vaucluse, Sydney yesterday writes Terry Ingram

Unlike many of the previous high prices the record was not entirely unexpected. Indeed It seems to have fallen a little short.

Yet various prospective buyers enlivened the weekend viewing by examining the bed thoroughly with magnifying glasses and ultra violet light undaunted by its anonymous offering in a curious openly hybrid (an offspring of room and house contents) auction of carpets, Australian paintings and other Chinese antiques.

Flights by still trending or new-to-the-market traditional artists helped lift results of the auction of the Bill and Eileen Cammack collection by held by Lawson's Auctions in the Menzies rooms in Sydney's Kensington on July 5 and 6.

Works by Neville Cayley (the son) soared above their modest estimates and very special paintings by John Allcot cruised away.

Also keenly bid were watercolours by a rarely seen at auction 101 year old painter of Central Australian Aborigines, Helen Baldwin, while many artists thought to have been lost to the culture bin reappeared with a surprising spread of takers.

But the big contribution to the unexpected excess value in the sale came from its 60 lots of carved Chinese ivories which were chased by members of the local Chinese community in the heavily packed room.

The trophy market is under pressure judging by two transactions which have taken place in the market for objects of desire over the past two weeks.

Saleroom habitués must begin wondering if the markets in art and the classic car, will also feel the pinch.

For it is in these upper reaches of the market, enthusiastic buying of the very rare and special, which increasingly invites the term trophyism, has been most emphatic.

Auctioneers frequently congratulate bidders from the rostrum of having won a lot they have just knocked down to them.

The objects, a stamp and a bank note still sold for a lot of money: $US9.01 million and "around $A1 million" respectively, writes Terry Ingram.

A piece of furniture which sold in a Leonard Joel decorative arts auction in  Melbourne for $3210 on May 24, 2010  is being promoted as the star piece of a Mossgreen sale of Australian Antiques and Historical Collectables on June 3 in Melbourne, with estimates of $250,000 to $300,000.

Mossgreen has yet, of course, to find a buyer for the piece.  But intensive research by the furniture history buff who bought it appears to support something of a revised re-evaluation of this rather unlikely candidate for stardom.

The lot, which could give a push to the static market in Victorian furniture and colonial collectables, is an elaborately made cradle from the 1840s which in outward appearance, is the very nemesis of current taste.

Chinese buyers paid one staggering and several top notch prices  at Sotheby's Australia auction of Fine Asian, Australian and European Arts and Design in Sydney on April 15, writes Terry Ingram.

Their bidding was still the major contributor to the $2.29 million gross which represented 134.15 per cent by value and 72 per cent by lot and compared with estimates of $1.71 million to $2.54 million.

At the invitation of Christie's, a Sydney collection is being bulked up by the Mayfair decorative arts trade to create an innovative type of auction at South Kensington on June 4. The Art of Design sale is being led by two portraits from Australia by the Belle Époque painter Emile Blanche and 18^th century British artist George Romney.

The Romney, Mrs Moody ….Holding a dog in her lap is pictured here in an interior from the former Watsons Bay home of French fashion plate designer Alfredo Bouret Gonzalez and the late Lex Aitken who formed the Sydney collection and also were the vendors of the Bridget Riley works sold in Sydney last August.

The surprise inclusion of Christie's auction of Australian and New Zealand art sale in London last October has been acquired by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington.

But visitors to that august public institution, part of the National Library of New Zealand, may have some difficulty in finding it if they look under the artist named in Christie's catalogue.

The inclusion, a watercolour titled A Settler and her Daughter with Maoris at Wanganui, with Mount Ruapehu Behind, was catalogued as the work of John Alexander Gilfillan (1793-1864). 

In another defining moment for the antique and art market in Australia, Sydney's oldest antique centre, the Sydney Antiques Centre, is to cease trading on June 30.

The building housing the 40 year old centre is going out to selective tender and the 50 plus stall holding tenants given until that date, that is triple their normal monthly notice, by the owner Anibou Pty. Ltd., to leave.