Tennants Auctioneers of Leyburn North Yorkshire took an overall hammer price of £1.2 million at their Summer Auction Sale (17 & 18 July) – confirming a renewed vigour and confidence in the antiques market, as public and trade buyers vied for the rare, beautiful and unusual. There is generally a paucity of really high quality items on the market (perhaps partly due to a slow housing market) so much so that demand outstrips supply. The firm’s rich and extensive offering was a rallying cry to collectors and dealers alike.

 

Serious damage is often the “death knell” for the commercial success of antique items at auction, especially where porcelain is concerned. The mention of “severe damage” in the catalogue description of a garniture of three Frankenthal (Bavaria) porcelain vases and covers dating to circa 1760 (lot 147) was expected to drastically limit interest in this colourful trio. There had been no real clues to what was to come (often in the form of saleroom talk during the viewing period) until the selling moment actually arrived and auctioneer Rodney Tennant took bidding swiftly to £5,000 (already ten times the top estimate) and then settled into a more rhythmic pace as two telephone bidders slogged it out to a £25,000 hammer price.

 

There was good reason why some of the highest and most successful prices in the jewellery section were realised, not for precious stone mounted pieces, but for those just with semi-precious. For the Arts & Crafts Movement it was the crafting of a piece of jewellery that usually counted more highly than the opulence of the stones. Thus much was invested in semi-precious stones to decorate what were often highly sculptural mounts. Witness an Arts & Crafts “Phyllida” pendant on chain by Arthur and Georgie Gaskin (lot 196). This openwork confection had its original Chipping Campden box as well as a rock solid provenance, by descent from Laurence Hodson of Compton Hall, patron of the Arts & Crafts movement, and godfather to Jocelyne Gaskin. It took £6,500. A suite of more formal Renaissance inspired green paste jewellery (lot 193) by the same makers sold strongly too at £3,000.

A Russian Arts & Crafts kovsh had the same semi-precious stone treatment (lot 412) which suitably enriched this vessel whose shape was that of a traditional Northern Russian wooden “scoop” for mead drinking. It sold for a multiple estimate £13,000.

 

Consigned for sale by a member of the Fitzherbert family was a remarkably early collection of 34 manuscript deeds (lot 598), some dating back as far as the 12^th century, though some were as late as circa 1460. The vellum deeds were contained in mediaeval leather and ashwood boxes called skippets, a truly remarkable survival. Some documents had been translated back in 1882, then appearing in the Journal of The Derbyshire Archaeological Society. Estimating the value of this unique lot was always going to be difficult and yet again the desire of bidders (twelve phone lines were active) saw it leap to £10,500.
 

 

A truly Rolls-Royce version of a Victorian games box (lot 609) contained all the most popular board, card or table games of the 1880 period – including chess, cribbage, bezique, ludo, playing cards, solitaire, horse racing and fishing. In a handsome but massive two-man lift coromandel wood case of drawers it attracted many sporting bids to come in at £7,500.

A group of six neo-classical vases fashioned from the highly attractive Derbyshire Spa Blue John (a name thought to be derived from the French “bleu jaune,” in reference to its blue- yellow colours), all from Little Rissington House near Cheltenham, sold for a total of £15,100. Highest individual lot price was for a semi-ovoid pair of urns, with particularly distinctive blue-yellow bandings, just 2 cm high (lot 627) at £4,600.

 

A rare Sikh miniature painting from the North West Frontiers, Punjab, privately consigned by a local elderly gentleman, attracted over ten telephone bidders. Exquisitely detailed and with colours to lift the soul this intimate study of two noblemen wearing bejewelled turbans in conversation beneath a curtain draped mirhab arch was sold for £4,000 (lot 631)

 

A fabulously glittering focal point of the saleroom throughout the five day viewing period was a French ormolu and cut glass eighteen-branch basket chandelier of circa 1900 (lot 654), removed from Leeds City Varieties Music Hall (currently undergoing a multi-million pound restoration programme). It was a piece of local decorative history which turned many bidders on and was taken to £6,500.

In the Sporting and Natural History section of the sale it was a black rhino horn trophy of an animal shot in Mashonaland 1881 and mounted by Burton & Sons of Wardour Street, London that took the day’s highest price of £26,000. Another white rhino horn trophy (lot 714) taken by the infamous J Gardiner Muir in 1893 (a man so prolific in the slaughter of rhinos that the first game regulations were introduced) sold for £21,000. A full mount lioness (lot 689) sold to a doctor in Germany for a commission bid of £3,000.

One of Lowry’s best known oil paintings “Going to the Match” has since 1999 belonged to the Football Association and depicts crowds of fans on their way to Bolton Wanderers’ ground Burnden Park. Tennants offered a reproduction colour print of this brilliantly evocative work (lot 768) from an edition of just 300. As the holy grail of Lowry print collectors it was soon in the back of the net at £6,000. A pastel drawing by one of Richmondshire M.P William Hague’s favourite artists Mackenzie Thorpe (born 1956) sold locally for £9,000 (lot 836). This dramatic scene was titled “Just Follow Me” and presumably showed a red sky in the morning……… Shepherd’s warning!

 

“Night Shift at Easington”, a moody and atmospheric oil painting by CountyDurham’s TomMcGuinness sold strongly for £5,800 (lot 943). The artist was a miner himself for 39 years, starting as a “Bevin Boy” and ending with redundancy in 1983.

 

Brightly coloured fishing boats have long been an attractive subject for artists - but put one in Whitby Harbour with a record setting giant tuna fish on deck and you have an extraordinary picture. Bradford born Richard Ernst Eurich’s 1933 oil of the Whitby boat Pity Me (owned by the Storr family) carrying the largest North Sea blue-fin tunny fish ever, caught by Mr Mitchell Hendry, hauled in a winning bid of £16,000.

 

In the Decorative Arts section a Wedgwood fairyland lustre vase decorated in the Tree Serpent/Imps on a Bridge pattern circa 1925 sold at a mid-estimate £5,000, while a Robert “Mouseman” Thompson oak straight fronted chest of drawers (lot 1081) from the classic period circa 1930, of good colour, made £5,800.

Furniture sold strongly across the board, and country furniture and oak remain particularly robust in the market, exemplified by an Oak dresser of circa 1700 (lot 1164) with a pleasing arrangement of geometrically faced drawers and cupboards which effected a telephone bidding duel which ended at £14,000.