Sep 8, 2025
Watching the Antiques Roadshow recently, I was reminded of the most important question a professional should ask when valuing something: why are you having it valued? This is because valuations will differ depending on the answer.
This might sound a little odd, but it’s logical, if you think about it. Let’s consider a diamond ring, for instance. If you want it valued for insurance purposes, you are going to need enough cover to replace it at retail cost. If you want it valued for sale at auction or to a dealer, the valuer will consider what a dealer might pay for it, so that they can add enough profit on to it to make it worthwhile buying for resale. In general, the insurance valuation in this case would be around four times the resale value at auction or to a dealer. That accounts for production costs, retail costs and the retail profit of the replacement ring.
Probate is another scenario. In that instance, a valuer is likely to provide a value on the low side, which is still realistic. So, it is possible to have four different values for the same item, all of which are valid.
This is why, for the most part, when you watch the Roadshow these days, the experts will specify how they are valuing what you present them with. “You could expect to get X at auction”, or “You should insure this for Y”, they will say. Anyone who simply says “It is worth X” is not really being much help unless they qualify the statement by explaining the circumstances of the valuation.
Another commonplace query when people consign items for auction concerns the reserve. This is the price below which the item will not be sold, to protect the seller from losing out. It is different from the estimate, which is made public and is the price range within which the item is expected to sell. Quite often the reserve will be fixed at the low estimate. Under English law it can’t be higher than the low estimate as that would be misleading potential buyers into thinking they could acquire it at the low estimate.
Pricing a piece for auction can be a tricky business in the same way that pricing a house for sale is. Make the estimate too high and you put off buyers; make it too low and you may annoy the consignor, while giving potential bidders an unrealistic impression of what it is worth – and that can be damaging for an auctioneer’s reputation.
Those who price their homes correctly for sale can attract a high number of viewings resulting in competition that puts the prices up as part of a bidding war. The same is true for chattels auctions, where the ideal price guide is one that remains within the realistic range of an item’s value but is low enough to entice bidders.
Aug 6, 2025
The system of British hallmarks dates back a few centuries, but the concept of hallmarking dates back thousands of years, to the time when coins first emerged as currency. Individually stamped by local officials, those early coins would have been made of electrum (a mix of gold and silver) or silver, and the stamp would denote the purity of the metal, which in turn attested to its value. It was much later that base metal coins represented far greater values, effectively acting as tokens rather than carrying their actual value in their make-up.
From the earliest times one of the problems with currency losing its value was the clipping of coins, where the unscrupulous would harvest minute amounts of silver from the edge of individual coins stamped for a specific value. Eventually they would have enough silver to either mint new coins or make other valuable items. However, this also meant that the currency in circulation depreciated in value. The authorities put a stop to this trick in the reign of Charles II by introducing lettering around the edge of coins.
If debasement of the coinage – as even happened officially under Henry VIII to save money – was an age-old problem, so was debasement of objects made from precious metals. How did you know that the ring or goblet you bought was pure gold or silver, and not made from something cheaper, mixed in with a little of the precious metal to give it the appearance of something more valuable?
In England, King Edward I started to tackle the problem by introducing a law in 1300 making it compulsory for all silver objects to meet a sterling silver standard of 92.5% purity. To ensure this, he ordered that objects passing an official test or ‘assay’ should be marked with a leopard’s head.
Edward’s grandson, Edward III, granted a charter to the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths 27 years later, and all objects made from gold had to be sent to the Goldsmiths’ Hall in London for assaying and approval. Hence the word ‘hallmark’.
Regional assay offices in England for silver were set up later in Sheffield, Birmingham, York, Exeter, Newcastle upon Tyne, Norwich and Chester. In Scotland, Edinburgh and Glasgow had assay offices, and in Ireland there was an office in Dublin. Sheffield, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Dublin survive. Of the others, some (Chester and Glasgow) lasted well into the 20th century, while others (Norwich, closed 1702) have been long gone.
Jul 14, 2025
This time of year is what the media call the Silly Season, traditionally a period when news is thin on the ground and reporters will file copy on bizarre tales that wouldn’t normally make it into print. They do this because many newspapers and news websites are working on skeleton staff during the holidays and are under more pressure to fill the space available. It’s an ideal time to look out for articles on the weird and wonderful things that have sold at auction.
I recently trawled through the archives with this in mind and here are a few of things I came up with:
- William Shatner’s kidney stone. That’s right, in 2006 the Starship Enterprise’s former Captain Kirk raised $25,000 for charity with this tasteless offering.
- A grandmother. Ten-year-old Zoe Pemberton put her grandma, Marion Goodall, up for auction on eBay in 2010. The site shut the sale down when the price reached £20,000.
- Lee Harvey Oswald’s coffin. After JFK’s assassin was exhumed in 1981 to check that a body double had not been buried in his place, he was reburied in a new coffin. The original one fetched nearly $90,000.
- New Zealand. In 2006 an Australian man set a starting pricing of one Australian cent for the country. eBay also closed down this sale… when bidding reached Aus$3,000.
While it may be the Silly Season, it is also the approach of the Grouse Season. This is an area of pheasant shoots, and while those ready to take aim will have to wait until October 1 for that, August 12 is the start of the Red Grouse season.
While blasting birds out of the sky has never been my passion, the paintings of game birds by Archibald Thorburn are. His depictions of pheasant, grouse and ptarmigan are pre-eminent among British bird painters of the past century, as prices at auction will confirm. A decent watercolour of any of these birds in a moorland setting will have no problem encouraging bids up to the £25,000 mark.
Collectors have long taken aim at Thorburn, but I suppose he really came into his own when the popularity of shooting spread from the landed gentry to commercial shoots in the 1980s.
Born the son of a miniaturist painter who worked for Queen Victoria near Edinburgh in 1860, Thorburn had little to no formal training except for a brief stint at art school in St John’s Wood. What really set him on the road to his life’s work was a stroke of luck. In 1887 when the Dutch artist J.G. Keulemans fell ill, Thorburn took over the commission from Lord Lilford of Northampton to complete the illustrations for the seven-volume Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands. By the time he finished his career had taken flight.
Jun 17, 2025
I have just completed a Q&A for a trade magazine, and it made me think, once again, of how the public view not just auctions but the wider art and antiques trade. While there are still a few people running cobweb-ridden, cluttered shops in country backwaters, where the stock seems to have been there from new, don’t make the mistake of thinking that auction houses and dealers are still living in the Dark Ages.
The auction process is both more complicated and exciting than retail, and that means we must have technology that is able to do a lot more than just complete a customer’s order online.
Live bidding, previewing lots for sale with multiple images, registering bidders from dozens of different countries, fulfilling our obligations under due diligence and other regulations means we must be at the top of our game all the time.
I’m delighted to say that this is as much a young man and woman’s game these days.
The excitement of buying and selling, collecting and doing deals knows no barrier when it comes to age or generation. It’s just the things that we choose to trade in that change over the years.
Thinking about this, it never ceases to amaze me how what are, frankly, in my opinion a series of unattractive daubs flung together in the name of Contemporary art can make millions at auction when highly accomplished and rather beautiful Victorian landscapes can be had for buttons.
I suppose that fashions change and, with them, tastes. Don’t get me wrong, I think a great deal of Modern and Contemporary art has a lot to offer, but it is also rife with mountebanks. However, the flipside of what has been a rather subdued market for late Victorian and Edwardian painting is that you can pick up stunning art for very little indeed.
Just browsing through one of the online auction platforms the other day, I worked out that, with a fair wind behind me, I could fill a whole wall with stunning Victorian and Edwardian watercolours for less than £2,000. Some of the pictures looked a bit tired, but closer inspection revealed that they simply needed a new mount and frame, and at these prices this was very much a realistic option.
I have no idea whether art like this will enjoy a renaissance in years to come – although it certainly deserves to – but those cherry picking now will be in the best position to capitalise if it does. And if prices remain in the doldrums, well they will have a fantastic selection of art gracing their walls, which they will never tire of.
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!
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.
