antiquesandartireland.com

An 18th/19th century Chinese cloisonne Guang or ritual vessel sold for a hammer price of 250,000 at Sheppards sale in Durrow today.  Just 15 inches high it had been estimated at 20,000-30,000.  Lot number 78 got three days of sales at Sheppards this week off to a flying start. It was bought by the London trade. Billed as an Irish Country House sale it features period furniture, fine art, decorative art, Asian art , rare books, manuscripts and maps.

The largest private collection of African Tribal Art in Ireland will come under the hammer on the first day of Mealy’s two day fine and decorative art sale in Castlecomer on July 15 and 16. A total of 150 lots from the collection of British Army office Allen Denton Miller, who started his personal collection as a young army officer in Dar es Salaam in 1959,  includes figures, masks, dolls, totems, pipes and flasks collected on visits to the Congo, Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Zambia.  The sale of over 1,100 lots includes fine art and antiques from various Irish and English private collections.  The catalogue is online.

 

 

 

THE 1955 All-Ireland Hurling Championship Medal awarded to Wexford’s Nickey Rackard was the top lot at the Fonsie Mealy rare book and collectibles sale in Dublin today.  It made 17,500 at hammer over an estimate of 5,000-7,000 in an auction which realised 250,000 at hammer and where 85 per cent of lots were sold.

The nine carat gold medal is in the design of a Celtic Cross.  It is engraved  with the name Nickey Rackard, widely regarded as one of the greatest hurlers in the history of the game. Wexford beat Galway 3-13 to 2-8 in the final.

A large collection of plant samples each pinned within a paper folder collected by Lady Adare and commenced in 1850 sold for 4,000 at hammer. It had been estimated at 800-1,200.

 

(See posts on antiquesandartireland.com for June 28 and June 21, 2014).

 

 

 

A magnificent gothic chandelier similar to the one in van Eyck’s celebrated painting The Arnolfini Portrait at the National Gallery, London leads Sotheby’s sale of Old Master Sculpture and works of art in London on July 10.  It dates to the closing decades of the 15th century.  The rare chandelier is estimated at £200,000-300,000.  It was probably made in either Dinant, in the Southern Netherlands, or Nuremberg, in Southern Germany, two of the leading centres for metalwork production in Europe at the time. Few 15^th-century examples of this scale survive. When they do they are to be found only in leading museums and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. 

UPDATE: IT SOLD FOR £314,500

Bob Dylan made auction history at Sotheby’s in New York today when his original handwritten lyrics for Like a Rolling Stone sold for $2,045,000. The 1965 epic topped Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.  The original working autograph manuscript was the top lot at Sotheby’s inaugural rock and roll history sale in New York.   It came complete with corrections, revisions and additions, written in pencil on Hotel Roger Smith stationary.  There are alternate rhyme schemes for the iconic “how does it feel” chorus from the album Highway 61 revisited. Since ushering in a new musical era in the 1960’s Like a Rolling Stone has remained enduringly popular.  The song transformed Dylan from a folk singer into a rock icon.  The near complete four page working draft was estimated at $1-2 million.  The sale totalled over $4 million.