Decorative furniture dominates top spots

Decorative furniture dominated the top spots at Moore Allen & Innocent's Antique and General Sale in Cirencester on Friday, August 12.

The top price of the day was achieved by a 19th Century glazed display cabinet on an 18th century George II stand.

With two floral carved doors on the cabinet and a frieze carved with foliate decoration, the attractive piece sold for an equally handsome sum of £1,700.

A late 19th century kidney shaped kneehole desk achieved the second highest sum. A leather inset top sat above a central frieze door flanked by two banks of four drawers. A bid of £1,000 secured the piece.

And a near-matching pair of oak Globe Wernicke four section bookcases on plinth bases made £620, prompting auctioneer David Greatwood to comment: “This demonstrates that there is a strong market for good decorative furniture.”

Outside of the furniture section, a Chinese brass bell decorated with dragons and birds and supported in a carved rosewood frame decorated with dragon masks and scrolls hit the right note with bidders, attracting a hammer price of £440.

In the picture section, a modern interpretation of mid-19th century primitive art by Russell Warby, entitled Mr Westbury's Prize Ram at Letting and featuring figures and sheep in a pen was sold for £420.

There was plenty of speculation in the room about the age of the picture, and auctioneer Philip Allwood was prompted to explain from the rostrum that he had taken tea with the artist, who was either ageing well or certainly wasn't painting in the mid- to late- 19th century.

And in the book section, illustrated antique books were flying off the shelves.

A lot including one volume of Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods, illustrated by the renowned English artist Arthur Rackham, one volume of Edmund Dulac's Picture Book for the French Red Cross, A E Johnson's The Russian Ballet, illustrated by Renee Bull, one volume The Fairy Book, London 1913, and one volume The Book of Old English Songs and Ballads, made £140.

And a second lot, included The Golliwogg in War!, The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg, The Golliwogg's Circus, and The Golliwogg at the Seaside, all by Florence K Upton, the American author who introduced the fictional character and its name to literature in 1895.

Also included in the lot were two volumes of English Struwwelpeter and one volume of The Political Struwwelpeter by Harold Begbie, and Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner and The Christopher Robin Storybook, all by A A Milne.

The children's books sold for £95, and served as a useful reminder that thousands of antique toys – almost the entire contents of the Park House Toy and Collectors Museum in Stow-on-the-Wold, are currently being catalogued, and will go to auction at Moore Allen on Thursday, September 29.

Meanwhile, the next sale at Moore Allen is the Sporting Sale on Friday, September 2. For an auction catalogue, log on to www.mooreallen.co.uk

A 19th Century glazed display cabinet on an 18th century George II stand	A late 19th century kidney shaped kneehole desk
A modern interpretation of mid-19th century primitive art by Russell Warby, entitled Mr Westbury's Prize Ram at Letting