Recommendations

Green shoots of recovery?

As many of you know I have been predicting a recovery in the art and antiques market for years!!  At last though there are some encouraging signs.  We reported on extraordinary interest- even enthusiasm at Olympia on the first night, and this has been followed by some very successful auctions in London in the last week or two.All  three of the major sale rooms had auctions of furniture and pictures.  Selling levels in all the sales were higher than they have been for a long time.  

In the Victorian picture sales there were some strong results, predicably for Grimshaw, but also for T S Cooper and Hunt, and Leader.   In the furniture sales, though, there were some dramatic results; perhaps the most spectacular being an Irish card table at Bonhams Bond Street.  This was a wonderful example of Geo 11 furniture in a lovely patinated state, although some people thought the slight warp in the top and the rather clean top surface were against it.  I certainly expected it to do well, but in the event I think everyone was suprised at the massive price of two hundred and thirty thousand pounds it achieved!

In the country too there have been suprises.  Perhaps one of the best sleepers of the year so far was buried in a very ordinary collective sale at Dreweatts in Newbury.  It too was an 18th century Irish side table, much larger scale than the other, but this had apparently been found in a leaky outhouse, and was in a very distressed state.  It carried an estimate of only three to five hundred pounds and was catalogued as out of period.   My own pre sale estimate was thirty to fifty thousand pounds and sure enough on the day it made forty two thousand pounds.

These results show that demand for the special pieces is as strong as ever, but beneath these headlines there is another story, and that is the level of unsold goods.  Over the last couple of years there have been unsold rates of about 40%, but suddenly this has fallen to only about 10%.  The days of real bargains at auction may be passing....
 

Kind regards,

Tim Corfield and Daniel Morris