May 19, 2025
June is the highlight of the year for the British art market, with dealers and collectors flying in from all over the world to take part in art and antiques fairs and auctions, and innumerable gallery shows also open.
While all this activity is largely based in London, all sorts of things worth visiting are going on outside the capital too.
You’ll never go wrong with a visit to Petworth – the Antiques Capital of the South, as it is known – and you can follow this up with tickets for the Petworth Summer Festival in July.
While schools and universities start to celebrate the end of exams and wind down for the summer, it will be business as usual across the regions auction rooms, and one of the best times of year to look for something special, with everyone else distracted.
I’ll be holding at least four cracking auctions a month, including specialist sales in Oriental works, fine antiques and paintings, so there’s bound to be something in there for you somewhere.
Meanwhile, think about the sporting occasions from May to July that inspire us – and themed sales: the F.A. Cup Final, the Derby, Royal Ascot, The British Lions tour, Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix, and, of course, our own Goodwood Festival of Speed. And this list doesn’t even begin to cover August, which will see The Hundred, cricket’s explosive festival where every ball counts, and the Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Big money is to be had when it comes to anything collectable directly associated with global sporting superstars. Lionel Messi’s six World Cup match-worn shirts from 2022, took $7.8 million at auction in December 2023, while Diego Maradona’s Hand of God jersey sold for $9.3 million in 2022. Tennis memorabilia linked to Nadal and Federer is already reaching the $100,000 mark – so start collecting Sinner and Alcaraz shirts and racquets now if you can manage to get your hands on them courtside.
It promises to be a wonderful summer!
May 16, 2025
John Nicholson’s are running a Valuation Day on Friday 30 May 10-3 at:
The Grange Community and Leisure Centre,
Bepton Road
Midhurst
West Sussex
GU29 9HD
Bring your collectables, gold, silver, watches and valuables to be consigned to auction – gold and silver currently selling at record high value
For further information, please contact Andrew Swain on 01428 653727 or sales@johnnicholsons.com
Apr 24, 2025
John Nicholson’s are seeking an experienced specialist for valuing and cataloguing consignments for our monthly auctions. Must have very good knowledge of Islamic and Oriental collectables and artefacts, and also needs to display a portfolio of clients.
- Rostrum experience preferred but not essential
- Full time position
Please send your your CV in the first instance to Phil Hildreth.
Email: phil.hildreth@johnnicholsons.com
Please only apply if you have relevant experience
No agencies
Apr 18, 2025
What’s the strangest thing you have ever seen at auction? I was asked the other day. A good question, but difficult to answer after several decades in the job.
Thinking back, though, several items stand out – not necessarily ones that passed through my hands, but nevertheless memorable.
The New Patent Exploding Trench was one. A Great War toy produced briefly by Britains, it involved a wooden and fabric trench loaded with six lead riflemen of the Gloucestershire Regiment. When hit, a specially placed flagstaff set off a cap, which made a loud report, shaking the trench and “killing” the soldiers. Why a British factory should have put British soldiers rather than the enemy in the trench is anyone’s guess, but it was a marketing disaster, and the toy was soon withdrawn. The result? A rare collectable that has made a decent four-figure sum in the two or three times it has appeared at auction over the past 20 years.
Perhaps the most chilling thing I have seen was not at auction but at a restoration firm. What looked like a framed piece of parchment turned out to be a collection of tattoos cut from the bodies of French soldiers in the field of Waterloo. Now who would want to buy that?
Almost as chilling – and certainly intriguing – is the Fiji Mermaid. This has its origins among Japanese fishermen, who sewed parts of different animals together to create chimera – in this case the head and arms of a monkey sewn to the body and tail of a fish.
They first came to Western notice after the captain of an American ship, thinking it a real creature, bought one from Japanese sailors in the early 19th century for thousands of dollars. The great American showman PT Barnum displayed it as a curiosity in the 1840s.
As a trip to Wikipedia will attest, Barnum understood how to generate publicity, writing to the newspapers under various pseudonyms on the subject of the Fiji Mermaid and creating a ruse whereby his associate booked into a Philadelphia hotel, secretly showing the creature to the manager, who then insisted on spreading the word and staging a display to a select audience, including journalists.
Probably destroyed in a fire around 20 years later, by then the legend had caught on and many copies were made. Look it up on Google images and see one for yourself.
Each example is usually named after the town in whose museum it now rests.
Mar 26, 2025
As Easter approaches, it reminds me of one of my favourite dreams: being asked to go through the boxes of a client’s attic to see if anything emerges that might be worth selling and coming across a Fabergé egg.
These jewels are among the most famous luxury items ever produced.
The first of several dozen of these jewel-encrusted eggs (around 70 are thought to have been made of which 61 are known to have survived) was commissioned as an Easter gift for the Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna by her husband, Tsar Alexander III, in 1885.
The House of Fabergé was established in St Peterburg in 1842, the celebrated eggs being the invention of Peter Carl Fabergé. The first, known as the Hen Egg, is an enamel shell surrounded by a gold band that opens to reveal a golden yolk. That opens too and is found to conceal a golden hen perched on golden straw. Rather like the Russian Babushka dolls, the hen itself then opens to reveal a miniature replica of a diamond Imperial crown and a ruby pendant.
Unfortunately, the crown and ruby pendant have since been lost, but the egg must have created quite a stir when first presented. We know this because such was the Tsarina’s delight that within weeks Fabergé had been awarded a royal warrant.
To make the following orders even more of a surprise, it is thought that Fabergé gave no clue even to the Tsar as to what the eggs would look like. Fabergé himself would oversee the design before handing the creation of the eggs over to a team of craftsmen, whose names have passed down through history as a result.
When Alexander’s son Nicholas II ascended the throne, he continued the tradition of presenting eggs as Easter gifts, both to his own wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, and his mother, the Dowager Empress. In all, they received fifty eggs between them, inspiring further commissions for Fabergé eggs from the Rothschild family and the Duchess of Marlborough, among others.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 put an end to the St Petersburg workshop, with the Fabergé family leaving Russia. More than a century on, the eggs sit at the centre of an impressive output of stunning silver, gold and jewelled pieces that continue to change hands at auction for stupendous sums.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed next time I’m asked to rummage through a few old boxes.
