AT the beginning of this week, I had a nostalgic time working my way through a pile of new auction catalogues—actual, physical catalogues. That used to be the way all of my weeks began, as it helped me to plan forthcoming visits and viewings. There are significant advantages to online catalogues when they are intelligently laid out, with illustrations from different angles and showing the backs of pictures, especially when there is a good quality zoom facility. The innovation of showing a person standing next to a hanging picture to demonstrate its ‘liveability’ is an excellent adjunct to sometimes easily overlooked printed measurements.
However, even if you have mastered the skills needed to juggle split screens, it is much easier to compare lots in different sales when one has the printed catalogues side by side—not to mention that a good catalogue in the hand is a pleasure in itself. Naturally, too, it may be easier to look up things from past sales when one has the catalogues on one’s shelf than it is to struggle through online archives.
As far as the international auction houses are concerned, however, catalogues are almost extinct, except for limited-run vanity editions for owners and favoured clients in an ever-more limited range of categories. For the time being, middle-sized businesses around this country are still publishing them—thus my recent postbag—and this may be connected to the fact that they continue to offer a wider range of specialities and have taken on specialists discarded by the internationals. As long as it lasts, I shall be happy to use both formats. Here, then, are a number of items drawn from recent catalogues of Woolley & Wallis of Salisbury, Wiltshire; Reeman Dansie of Colchester, Essex; and Dreweatts of Newbury, Berkshire.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 05, 2024-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der June 05, 2024-Ausgabe von Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
