Antiques: No shortage of online opportunities to collect
Even if twenty kilometres instead of five kilometres is not quite far enough there is no shortage of online opportunities to source antique furniture, art and collectibles without ever leaving home.
The calendar for upcoming sales is filling up nicely as auctioneers and others adapt to restrictions required to keep a virulent and dangerous disease at bay.
Collectibles have been doing especially well. Architectural items, pub fittings and collectibles from the collection of Gerard Derry go under the hammer online at Victor Mee’s weekend sale in Co Cavan today and tomorrow on Easy Live Auctions. Interest has been huge.
At part one of the sales a couple of weeks ago a cast-iron sunburst wall feature estimated at €100-€200 sold for €1,500, a metal model of a giraffe made €1,700 over a top estimate of €450 and a pair of 19th-century cast-iron gothic windows made €3,400 over a top estimate of €400.
Many other lots remained within estimate so do not give up hope if your collecting habit leads you to an unusual hand-painted Murphy’s Irish Stout sign.
The hanging sign in the form of a painter is lot 722 at Victor Mee’s sales at 2pm today and tomorrow and is estimated at €300-€600.
The most expensively estimated lot is the early 19th-century hand-carved Pulpit of Truth by Louis Mascre, commissioned by Baron and Baroness Crawhez and donated to the Church of St Martin in Ransart, Belgium. It took over three years to make and is estimated at €40,000-€80,000.
Bidding on Morgan O’Driscoll’s online sale of Irish art runs to next Monday evening between 6.30and 9pm.
There is work by Patrick Hennessy, Paul Henry, Kenneth Webb, Pauline Bewick, John Behan, Patrick O’Reilly and John Butler Yeats and you can view whenever it suits you.
Richard Scott, who has held wonderful outdoor sculpture exhibitions at Ballymaloe over the last few summers, will go ahead this year with social distancing. Final details and dates are being worked out but this year the exhibition will be bigger than usual.
There was a world record price for a penny struck in Northern Ireland at an online sale at Dix Noonan Webb in London last week.
An American collector paid £6,200 for the Andrew Willoughby penny from Carrickfergus, which was struck in the 17th century. It had a top estimate of £300.
At Woodward’s last Saturday the early 20th-century painting of The Queen’s Hotel, Queenstown (now The Commodore, Cobh) by Walter Richards previously featured on these pages made a hammer price of €1,500 over a top estimate of €500.
There were plenty of furniture bargains, like a Louis XV style drawing-room suite (hammer €425), a five-piece cast-iron garden suite (€600), a Georgian oak bureau (€150), a Victorian three-tier dumbwaiter (€60), a William IV card table (€320), an Edwardian hall table (€360) and a Georgian chest of drawers (€240).
The three Guinness toucans shown here last week sold for €45.
