AUCTION Sales round-up
The Cong vase is based on earlier neolithic jade designs
Skånes Auktionsverk, Landskrona A 20th-century porcelain vase, 30cm tall and with minor imperfections, sold for 1m SEK (£74,250) – beating its estimate of 5,000 SEK (£370) at the Swedish auctioneer’s recent sale.
It was modelled in the shape of a Cong (pronounced tsong) vase – a jade tube first made in the neolithic period more than 4,000 years ago. In the 13th century, Song dynasty (960–
1279) emperors revived the tradition of celadon-glazed vases, with the practice again revived in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).
The vase has elephant-head handles suspending fixed rings and includes trigrams (ancient Chinese symbols made up of combinations of three whole or broken lines) on its sides.
Tennants Auctioneers, Leyburn An album of early 20th-century photographs of Africa beat its guide price of £200-£400 at the North Yorkshire auction house’s recent sale when it sold for £1,400.
h en it sold for £1,400. n by the Glaswegian
The 130 views taken by the Glaswegian photographer David Anderson captured scenes in British Central Africa (Malawi) and Dar-Es-Salam, in Tanzania.
Anderson spent most of his life in Africa but died
The album covered scenes from modern-day
Malawi and
Tanzania
The photographer David Anderson may have captured himself in one of the photos from skin cancer in the Glasgow area in the 1960s. It is believed he is depicted with rifle in one of the photographs in the album.
Loddon Auctions, Reading A 1912 cigarette card showing the American baseball pitcher Rube Marquard hit a home run when it sold for £12,000 at the Berkshire auction house, beating its guide price of £300-£500.
While most UK tobacco companies produced cigarette cards featuring British sports figures, royalty and military heroes, others like Bristol tobacco producer W.D. & H.O. Wills issued cards featuring US sportspeople. It came from the T215 baseball series issued by Wills in 1912 using imagery from the hugely sought-after T206 baseball collection (c.1909-1911) by the American Tobacco Company, issued in both
A cigarette card lit up the bidding in
Reading the US and UK. The most expensive card from that series, depicting Honus Wagner
(1874-1955), sold for $7.25m in 2022.
Eight mother-ofpearl pieces sold for a total of £80,000 in Buckinghamshire
Amersham Auction Rooms Eight pieces, sold in two lots, each described as “mother-of-pearl collectables” and valued at £40£60, sold for a total of £80,000 after they were discovered to be 16th to 17th-century Indo-Portuguese treasures from Gujarat. As reported in last month’s Antique Collecting, the region on the northwest coast of India, was home to an affl uent Portuguese population in the 1500s after Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to the Indian subcontinent in 1498. It became a hub for trading luxury goods, including mother-ofpearl, which became a favourite among the wealthy elite and popular at the royal courts of France and Henry VIII.
14 ANTIQUE COLLECTING
The rare card featured an advert for Pirate cigarettes on the reverse
