I’m still catching up with the auctions, but I think we are nearly there now. I missed the recent Van Sabben auction entirely, but then there were only three or four bits of British interest in there, of which this Reginald Mount poster was perhaps the most interesting.
There seems to be an almost unfailing rule with Van Sabben, that they will always have a Reginald Mount poster and it will usually be one I’ve not seen before (we’ve been known to buy them in the past, too). I wonder where they come from?
This one, however, is unsold, and so you could still get it in the aftersale if you wished, along with these two.
In the interests of accuracy I must point out that the Buckle poster dates from 1938 so much of Bristol’s medieval architecture was subsequently bombed, then quite a lot of what remained was trashed by planners, so don’t go looking for it on the basis of what you see on here.
There’s also a poster of the Queen’s Coronation Regalia still on offer should you desire, but I don’t.
More troublingly, I also missed out on the most recent Christies Sale, but I am inclined to think that this was a bit of a Freudian slip, as I didn’t much care for it. There was a tonne of French and Russian stuff – and I know that this is just them doing what auction houses do, following the money, but even so.
There were a couple of London transport pair posters that I tend to follow in the auctions, because we’ve owned one and still own the other.
And so I can tell you that as both went for £750, prices are dropping, because they did used to fetch £1,000 each a few years ago. Other than that it was a pretty dreary selection, so no wonder I forgot.
On a more cheery note, Onslows have put up a preview for their December auction (carefully timed so that we can all forget about it thanks to Christmas parties and so on). Highlight for me is this delightful Henrion.
I said to Mr Crownfolio that there would be no point buying it as we’d never have a Christmas poster framed. He laughed at me, and quite rightly, because this is our hallway.
There are more on the other side, too, so that’s me told.
Apparently the Henrion is just part of a large collection of GPO posters. These seem to be all the rage as almost every auction seems to have had something similar this year. There are other ones illustrated, including quite a few of the fine art location ones like this.
But also this lovely Eckersley too.
There are Cuneos, and railway posters and all sorts of other things too, but who cares about those in comparison to the GPO delights?
Finally, something happening in real life rather than on the internet. This Saturday, November 22nd, I will be at a Vintage and Other Things fair (the other things include macaroons, so I’m quite looking forward to this) selling all of our lovely Daphne Padden prints and tea towels and mats and cards, along with a selection of vintage posters.
It’s at the Silkmill, Merchant’s Barton, Frome, Somerset BA11 1PT. Do come along, and if you mention Quad Royal, you’ll get a free Party Ring biscuit.
Re Christies – is it a self-fulfilling problem we are seeing with them? They put up their starting prices when they were running poster sales with loads of British posters, which means they got less posters to sell, then they did it again, so now there are hardly any British posters at all. This presumably means that there aren’t many collectors of British posters who will now bother to attend a Christies poster auction, so therefore there are less bids on the posters in the sales. Hence those which sold (only about half of them) almost all only just about made the bottom estimate.
And the Bawden and Gentleman ones you mentioned must have only just scraped their reserve – actually £600 rather than the £750, as that includes the buyers’ premium.
We already know that Bloomsbury is a bit iffy with Poster sales, Christies has proved it’s no better; so is everyone selling at Onslows now……or are they back to stashing under the bed!
Except that the next Onslow’s sale is on 21st December, when posters aren’t the most urgent things for most people, who’ve just spent too much money in any case.
I think that railwayana auctions may be at least part of the answer these days (although the results for posters at the last one I was looking at did seem to have been derived from a random number generator as far as I could tell). And then there’s always eBay.