September 2014 - Page 7 of 18 - Auction Central News

Linwoods marks successful first year with Sept. 27 auction

Chinese scroll ink and color on paper painting attributed to Huang Junbi. It measures 52 inches by 25 3/4 inches. Estimate: $30,000-$45,000. Linwoods Auction image.

ALHAMBRA, Calif. – The season’s long-anticipated change brings a splendid cornucopia of new offerings. In celebration of an encouragingly successful inaugural year, Linwoods Auction of Southern California will present a veritable cache of decorative arts, unique jewelry, distinctive period furniture, and fine art masterpieces at a special one-day auction on Saturday, Sept. 27.

LiveAuctioneers.com will facilitate Internet live bidding.

Linwoods Auction House offers a variety of Chinese arts and antiquities, precious stones, fine jewelry and rare furnishings at the autumn event. September auction items include a wide variety of porcelain works, jade, jadeite sculptures and soapstone carvings, precious gemstones, scroll paintings, ancient silk courtiers’ robes and museum-worthy furniture.

“We are honored to have been given the opportunity to showcase some truly unique works this auction,” said curator Lisal Ong. “We feel privileged to be making a number of lots available from the collections of a few esteemed lifetime collectors.”

Memorable lots from the September auction include a magnificent collection of kesi-woven silken embroidered courtiers’ robes and embroidery panels from the imperial court of the Qing dynasty. Another notable offering is a number of HuangHuaLi furniture pieces of the highest quality and craftsmanship. A discerning lifetime collector is also parting with scroll paintings and porcelain works.

The auction opens with a vast array of snuff bottles, intricately crafted in jade, white jade, agate, and cloisonné and featuring semi-precious stone detailing. One lot of particular interest is lot 5723, a unique black and white Hetian jadeite snuff bottle with intricately carved figurine overlays.

Other notable lots include the impressive collection of silk courtiers’ robes and embroidery panels from the Imperial Qing dynasty (lots 5755-5764) amassed by a lifetime collector in San Francisco. Lot 5764, a navy silk robe featuring mythical dragons chasing flaming pearls among stylized clouds, epitomizes the beauty and regal grandeur of this collection.

Another cornerstone of the day’s offerings is lot 5719, a lustrous conjoined archaistic vase painstakingly carved from a multihued piece of very rare jadeite in lavender, gray and apple green tones with russet suffusions. This masterfully crafted piece also comes with a GIA certificate.

Elegant in its simplicity and design is lot 5800 a white Hetian jadeite brush washing bowl with carved bat detailing and suspended side rings.

Distinctive furniture lots (lots 5902- 5916) include a number of museum-worthy pieces, some of which were amassed by a Manhattan lifetime collector who prized huanghuali and zitan woods for their strength, durability and gleaming finish. A significant collection piece is lot 5908, a pair of huanghuali horseshoe-backed chairs from the Republic period, magnificently crafted with impeccable detailing.

The auction will also offer fine jewelry pieces in a variety of forms, from amber prayer beads, to rare Tibetan dzi beads to unique jade and jadeite pieces. Noteworthy jewelry lots include Lot 5724, a luminous green jadeite pendant with cabochon style petals surrounded in gold with clusters of nearly perfect diamonds, with GIA certificate.

The proprietors of Linwoods have married their mutually held passion for fine art and collectibles with decades of expert sales and acquisitions for their growing network of international clients. With a promising first year in Southern California, they have plans in place for monthly in-house auctions. The Sept. 27 event will begin at 3 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. For additional information call Lisal Ong at 626-457-8818.

View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

Trove of Great Depression photographs a click away

Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) photograph of Mrs. Bill Stagg with states quilt, Pie Town, New Mexico. Russell photographed Japanese-American citizens sent to internment camps during World War II. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

BOISE, Idaho (AP) – When Dorothea Lange drove through Emmett on her way to Ola in northern Gem County one day in October 1939, the San Francisco woman was arguably the most famous photographer in the nation.

Three years earlier, Lange had shot a series of photographs of Florence Owens Thompson and her children that became known as the “Migrant Mother” series. One of the photos shows Thompson with a baby in her arm, two other children beside her facing away from the camera, and their mother looking into the distance without hope.

That photograph was printed in newspapers across the country and became the iconic photo of the Great Depression.

In 1939, Lange was sent by the federal Farm Security Administration to document the Ola Self-Help Sawmill, a cooperative established by Ola residents. The mill was seeded with a $1,500 loan from the FSA.

Lange shot 58 photos during her time in Ola. (I doubt my mother, Io Blessinger Sowell, ever realized who the photographer was who took a photo of her and her classmates in front of the Ola school.)

Those photos are among 170,000 now available for viewing via an online map created by Yale University. The photographs, taken between 1935 and 1944, can be accessed by clicking on a particular county or by searching under Lange or 131 other photographers who fanned out across the country to document government relief programs.

All but six Idaho counties – Bear Lake, Benewah, Caribou, Elmore, Kootenai and Owyhee – are represented.

Malheur County, just across the state line in Oregon, has nearly 800 photos, more than any Idaho county. Lange went there after she left Ola.

The photo project was part of a massive propaganda effort meant to build support for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. It came after courts had dealt the president a massive blow by repealing many of his early programs designed to lift the country out of the Depression.

While in Ola, Lange wrote that the owners of the Ola lumber mill needed a way to sustain themselves after several years of severe conditions that caused a deterioration of farming and grazing.

“The nearest supply of lumber available is at Emmett, which makes its cost, delivered to the farmer, prohibitive,” Lange wrote. “Their own valley is bordered on the east by a forest that could develop an unlimited supply of yellow pine and Douglas fir.”

Lange’s photos showed members of the cooperative sawing logs, and posing individually and in groups. There are also photos of the kids outside the school, co-op members farming and some home scenes.

“It’s amazing,” longtime Ola resident and music teacher Gloria Sutton said. “It’s just interesting to see those photos.”

Three other heavyweight photographers – Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon – also took pictures in Idaho.

Lee became famous for his color shots of people in Pie Hole, N.M., in 1940. It turned out he also shot 942 of the 1,215 Depression-era photos taken in Idaho, including one of a car coming down what’s known today as Old Freezeout Hill south of Emmett.

Rothstein shot 37 photos in Oneida County in southeastern Idaho in 1936, when he was 21. He documented farm families whose land was too poor to support them.

Earlier that year, he shot his most famous photograph in Cimarron County, Okla. It showed farmer Art Coble and his two sons struggling to walk in front of their house during a dust storm.

Vachon started work maintaining the FSA’s photo collection. He later became a photographer himself and shot nine photos in Idaho Falls in April 1942. Eventually, he worked as a staff photographer for Life and Look magazines.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order on Feb. 19, 1942, more than 120,000 people of Japanese heritage – two-thirds of them United States citizens – were uprooted from their homes in Washington, Oregon and California and sent to prison camps in several states.

Single men were recruited before they left the horse barns that served as a temporary holding center in Portland to work the sugar beet crop in Nyssa, Ore.

“They were so hard up for help over here and the reason they were hard up for help, everybody was in the Army,” said Yasu Teramura, in an interview with the organizers of a photo exhibit that debuts Friday at the Four Rivers Cultural Center in Ontario. “The sugar company got an OK that we could come over here … but we had to be under strict restrictions that you could only stay up (until) 8 o’clock at night and you know you couldn’t roam around all over unless you went with some guard … to go to the show and stuff.”

The laborers were allowed to live without the barbed-wire fences that kept inmates inside the World War II prison camps where many of their friends and relatives were sent in Hunt, north of Twin Falls, and in other states. Yet they were forced to live in tents that provided little shelter and, later, in meager barracks.

“This was still internment,” said Matthew Stringer, executive director of the Four Rivers center. “They had a curfew and they could only go into town twice a week (never on Saturday) and under constant supervision.”

The photo exhibit, “Uprooted: Japanese American Farm Labor Camps During World War II,” features a series of photographs taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee in Nyssa and at later farm camps that opened in Idaho in Rupert, Shelley and Twin Falls.

Many of the photos, available for viewing online from Yale University’s Photogrammar site, have never been part of a public exhibit before.

Organized by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, the exhibit opens with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on Friday. From 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, curator Morgen Young will present a history of the Nyssa farm camp. Several of the camp workers and others who had friends and family members work at the camp are expected to take part in a question-and-answer session during the lecture.

The exhibit runs through Dec. 12. It will then be on display from Jan. 16 to March 16 at the Minidoka County Historical Society in Rupert, followed by exhibitions in Portland and in Los Angeles.

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Information from: Idaho Statesman, http://www.idahostatesman.com

AP-WF-09-18-14 1726GMT

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Marathon session in store for Jeffrey Evans glass sale Sept. 27

Important cut Strawberry Diamond cruet stand with American eagle handle. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image.

MT. CRAWFORD, Va. – Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates will hold its 20th annual fall auction of pattern glass and other types of glass in a marathon session, Sept. 27. The sale features items from legendary collections built over decades. Consignors consist of Carmen Lyman of Tulsa, Okla., John W. Ragsdale of Broken Arrow, Okla., and Dr. Larry McCallister of Muncie, Ind., and a private collector from Pennsylvania.

LiveAuctioneers.com will facilitate Internet live bidding.

Highlights include an outstanding selection of American historical glass including rare U.S. Coin, important figural pieces, presidential and World’s Fair-related items, flint tumblers and mugs, nonflint Early American Pattern Glass including rare animal patterns, collections of Duncan Ellrose and Shell & Tassel, Kansas, and Fostoria Number 575/Carmen, vaseline and other colored patterns, novelty forms, Greentown and milk glass. The auction also includes flint Early American Pattern Glass including rare examples of Bellflower and Horn of Plenty patterns, and other early glass including cut Pittsburgh, lacy-pattern salts, colored flint and syrup jugs.

For details email info@jeffreysevans.com or call 540-434-3939.

View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

Sampling of rare flint and nonflint Early American Pattern Glass and historical glass. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image.

Rare Ripley candlesticks including a rare baptismal font with cover. Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates image.

Rumrunning recalled in Port Huron Museum exhibit

The CG-100, one of the 203 75-foot patrol boats built specifically for Prohibition enforcement duties. Known as the 'Six-Bitters,' these seaworthy boats had a top speed of 15 knots, slower than most of the rumrunners they were up against in the 1920s. U.S. Coast Guard image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

PORT HURON, Mich. (AP) – Museum exhibits are all about artifacts and stories and statistics – and here’s one number that will grab your attention:

Of all the illicit booze that flowed into the United States during the Prohibition, said Douglas Bancroft, about 75 percent came through the stretch of shoreline from Port Huron to south of Detroit.

“There’s almost 26 miles of almost a straight shot to bring booze over here,” he told the Times Herald of Port Huron.

Bancroft is the exhibit and facilities manager at the Port Huron Museum Carnegie Center. He’s the guy who put together much of the museum’s latest exhibit, “Behind the Barrel: Prohibition in the Blue Water Area.”

Flappers, bootleggers and pocket flasks: The Port Huron Museum’s new exhibit examines Prohibition in the Blue Water Area

The exhibit recently opened to the public. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays until Jan. 11.

The ironic aspect of Michigan serving as the tap for most of the illicit liquor that flooded the country during the Prohibition is the state was one of the first to go dry.

“Michigan did go dry before the rest of the country,” said Katherine Bancroft, director of collections and education at the museum. “And there actually were counties that went dry before the entire state went dry. There are different years that it happened. I believe the earliest one was 1913.”

The exhibit covers the 13 years from the enforcement of the Volstead Act, which started on Jan. 17, 1920, to the ratification of the 21st Amendment – which effectively repealed the 18th Amendment that made Prohibition possible – in 1933.

In another touch of irony, Jan. 17, 1920, was the 21st birthday of the most notorious bootlegger and mobster, Al Capone.

Bootleggers, rumrunners and gangsters are an important part of the exhibit. A gallery displays a Thompson submachine gun, a favorite weapon of gangsters and one made famous in movies and TV shows. The rotunda features a vintage Ford Model A and portraits of public enemies such as bank robber John Dillinger and Herbert Youngblood Jr.

Youngblood broke out of jail with Dillinger and somehow ended up in Port Huron where he was gunned down during a shootout with city police.

“With the story of Dillinger and his buddy, Herbert Youngblood, breaking out of jail with a fake wooden gun and getting in a big South Park shootout; it’s a great story to tell,” Douglas Bancroft said.

The exhibit also includes a genuine still from the 1920s and a clawfoot bathtub for making bathtub gin.

“You could make (alcohol) for your own consumption, but you couldn’t sell it, you couldn’t transport it,” Katherine Bancroft said. “If you were caught doing those things, you were sent to jail.”

One of the centerpieces of the exhibit is a re-creation of the Union Hotel, which stood where Gill-Roy’s Hardware now is.

The exhibit includes a hotel room, a reception area and a card room. Douglas Bancroft said the hotel was a place where working stiffs went to get a drink. There’s also a large mirrored chamber where people can learn to do the Charleston by following the footprints on the floor.

That chamber includes information about Colleen Moore, an early silent screen star who was born Kathleen Morrison in Port Huron.

Telling that kind of local history, Katherine Bancroft said, is what the museum does.

“I think we have in the past couple of years been turned more toward the in-house exhibits, and that gives us the opportunity to tell the local stories,” she said.

People come to the museum and see artifacts or photos that remind them of Port Huron’s past, she said.

“That local tie is important,” she said. “That affects people who live in this area because they want to hear about the history of where they live.”

Susan Bennett, museum director, said the exhibit builds upon the success of last year’s exhibit about the Great Storm of 1913.

“The local angle is what brings people into this institution,” she said.

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Information from: Times Herald, http://www.thetimesherald.com

AP-WF-09-18-14 0812GMT

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Metropolitan Museum showcases photos by Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954). ‘Pantheon, Rome,’ 1990. Chromogenic print. Private collection, New York

NEW YORK –Twenty-five photographs by Thomas Struth (German, born 1954), one of the most accomplished and celebrated artists of the last half-century, will be on view at yhe Metropolitan Museum of Art from Sept. 30 through Feb. 16. From his early black-and-white streetscapes made in New York in 1978 to recent and previously unseen works, Struth’s photographs explore both the traditions and actual conditions of a world on the cusp of global change.

“Thomas Struth: Photographs” offers a compact yet comprehensive survey of the major developments in this prominent artist’s oeuvre. A new photograph, Figure 2, Charité, Berlin (2014), shows the use of robotics during a surgical operation. Also included are examples from the landmark Museum Photographs series –large-scale views of visitors in museums and other cultural settings – as well as sensitive and humanistic portraits and wall-size views of grand public spaces from Times Square to Tiananmen Square.

The Metropolitan owns three stellar works from Struth’s “Museum Photographs,” and a highlight of this installation will be the inclusion of another from the series, on loan from a private collection – the iconic Pantheon, Rome (1990), perhaps Struth’s signature image from the series. Showing visitors gazing as if to the heavens in one of the greatest buildings to survive from antiquity, his photograph unites the timeless and the ephemeral, allowing viewers to see two perspectives – the ideal and the real – on the same theme.

Also featured is a lush, primeval-looking forest scene in Japan, Paradise 13, Yakushima, Japan (1999), among other majestic photographs.

The exhibition includes a work recently acquired by the museum, Hot Rolling Mill, ThyssenKrupp Steel, Duisburg (2010). This monumental, 9-foot-wide color photograph brings Struth full circle to the industrial architectural subjects of two of his professors from the Kunstakadamie in Düsseldorf during the mid-1970s, Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Evidence of the Bechers’ influence can also be seen in Struth’s portfolio The Streets of New York, one of only three complete sets created by the artist in 1978, acquired by the Metropolitan in 1982, and shown in this installation in its entirety. Avoiding subjectivity through a centralized viewpoint and comparative technique, Struth cataloged with clarity and dispassion the unselfconscious structures that characterize a culture – that irreducible mélange of textures, shapes, and the scale of its streets. The result was an unprecedented update of the tradition of urban photography infused with a deep understanding of context and serial progression. Struth had absorbed then-recent developments in Minimal and Conceptual art at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie. As with his later series, he leaves space for each viewer’s participation in understanding his or her environment and, by extension, any environment – an exercise in critical vision that is essentially global and salutary in effect.

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Medical society regains control of historic Detroit hospital

Historic Dunbar Hospital in Detroit is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Image by Andrew Jameson at en.wikipedia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

DETROIT (AP) – Detroit is letting a local medical group regain ownership of the city’s first African-American hospital.

The Detroit News reports a late reversal of an auction sale will let the Detroit Medical Society regain ownership of Dunbar Memorial Hospital. The historic building sold for $196,000 Wednesday at a Wayne County tax auction.

Although the county foreclosed on the property months ago and listed it for auction, the group only found out last week. Detroit’s water department decided to cancel its lien and an outstanding bill that had grown to $3,800 with late fees.

The lack of a lien forced the county to reverse the foreclosure.

The group purchased the hospital in 1978 to restore it as a museum. It’s been vacant since a costly renovation stalled in 2010.

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Information from: The Detroit News, http://detnews.com/

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‘Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010’ opens Oct. 9 at Tate Modern

Sigmar Polke (German, 1941-2010), 'Girlfriends (Freundinnen),' 1965/66, © 2013 Estate of Sigmar Polke / ARS, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

LONDON – Sigmar Polke (1941-2010) was one of the most experimental artists of recent times. Alongside Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo, Polke was a key figure in the generation of German artists who first emerged in the 1960s.

This fall Tate Modern presents the first full retrospective of Polke’s career, bringing together paintings, films, sculptures, notebooks, slide projections and photocopies from across five decades, and including works which have never before been exhibited.

The Polke exhibition will open on Oct. 9 and run through Feb. 8, 2015. It is sponsored by The Sigmar Polke Exhibition Supporters Group and Tate International Council

For additional information about the exhibition, visit Tate Modern online at http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/alibis-sigmar-polke-1963-2010

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Polar exploration notes reach Dreweatts & Bloomsbury sale Oct. 2

Glass negatives of the ship Discovery and Captain Scott and members of the crew on their arrival at Lyttelton, New Zealand. [Lot 262, est. £500-700]. Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions image.

LONDON – A fascinating collection of notes written by members of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott’s National Antarctic Expedition on their journeys across the snows of the southern continent. The collection will go under the hammer in London during Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions sale of printed books and manuscripts on Thursday, Oct. 2.

LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding.

These eight sledging notes were written by members of the expedition during the “Heroic Age” of polar exploration and give a vivid insight into the challenges and obstacles of their work in the Antarctic.

The National Antarctic Expedition 1901-04 led by Scott was one of the first major scientific and natural history expeditions to Antarctica, which saw the first ascent of the polar plateau in the Western Mountains and the discovery of the first Emperor penguin egg.

Remarkably one of the notes in the collection, from Lt. Michael Barne to Lt. Charles Royds back at Winter Quarters on board the ship Discovery was delivered by Vinka, the pet dog of Albert Borlase Armitage, second in command of the expedition, across miles of frozen featureless tracts with the note attached to her collar by a boot lace.

“Dear Royds, I am very much afraid we shall have to drop not only the pelsk bag, but probably a week of our own provisions off the point of White Island. I don’t know when we are likely to get there as our speed is only between 1/4 & 1/2 a mile an hour. If we drop anything, it will be 1/2’ N of the nearest of the two points at the N end of White I[slan]d & will be marked with a large flag. The snow here is not quite so deep, but it is as much as ever we can do to start the sledges on ski, we cannot even start the first sledge, I hope Vinka will turn up all right. We are going to starve her & do our best to send her back.” Lot 258 carries an estimate of £2,000-3,000.

Barne’s sledging party, consisting of six men (Smythe, Plumley, Williamson, Crean, Weller), did not have a supporting party, which was the normal way to send notes back to the ship. Fortunately for Barne, when he left the ship two days earlier Armitage’s pet Samoyed, Vinka, had followed his sledging party. Barne did not have extra dog food to look after his senior officer’s dog so he took the decision to starve her and send her back to the ship, hoping she would find her way.

Other letters and notes in the collection paint a cheerier picture of the life of an explorer. One from Armitage to Royds ends; “My best chin – chin to Micky, Bunny & Muggins, all good luck old chap, all hands in best of spirits & health & doing grandly” [Lot 256, est. £3,000-4,000].

Another sent from Reginald William Skelton to Royds in the run up to Christmas, Dec. 10, 1902 says; “Just a line to wish you a Merry Christmas… We have been having a most enjoyable trip, though it has been hard work as you may imagine, the last 19 or 20 miles all double hauling, – we are now over 4000 ft high & about to attack a regular Spion Kop – however Koettlitz will tell you all about it. The Supplementary party have done very well… Armitage gave any of my party chance of returning, but they didn’t take it. – Whitfield is a rare good man out,- Armitage says he would have liked to taken him on,- so if you get a chance to give him another trip, – perhaps you will be able to do so” [Lot 263, est. £2,000-2,500].

Other topical works in the sale include a 17th century broadside on the Scottish colony of Darien that lead to the union of England and Scotland [Lot 7, est. £1,500-2,000]. The wider manuscript section covers a broad range of bizarre and interesting topics like murder, suicide, execution, dueling and Victorian midwifery.

Elsewhere, leading the English and Continental Literature is a large 18th century gentleman’s library. Of particular note is Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-88, first edition in six volumes [Lot 150, est. £7,000-9,000].

Books from the library of the late David Bauman include George Cruikshank’s Omnibus, 1842. This first edition was bound from the original monthly parts. Loosely inserted into the work is the original illustrated letter by Robert Cruikshank to George Cruikshank and five original pencil sketches by George Cruikshank, one has a watercolor wash and has been heightened in white [Lot 342, est. £600-800].

The sale of Printed Books and Manuscripts will be held at Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions saleroom in London’s Mayfair.

View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

The note dated Dec. 21, 1902 that was carried by a lone pet dog across miles of featureless Antarctica. Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions image.

A note sent from Reginald William Skelton to Charles Royds on Dec. 10, 1902 contains Christmas greetings. Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions image.

Winter Olympia Art & Antiques Fair sets program of events

Image courtesy of Winter Olympia Art & Antiques Fair, London

LONDON – The 24th Winter Olympia Art & Antiques Fair, Nov. 3-9, 2014, is the only high-caliber art and antiques fair between October and March and a highlight of the winter art season. One hundred and twenty of the UK’s top dealers will be selling exceptional examples of fine art and antiques from all periods. Popular with collectors, interior designers and those looking for something different, the stock on sale ranges from dining tables to diamond rings. For the second year running, it coincides with Asian Art in London.

An expected 22,000 visitors will find over 30,000 pieces across 32 disciplines including: furniture, 20th century design, jewelry, art, Asian pieces, ceramics, sculpture, silver, mirrors, lighting, fossils, clocks, textiles and glass.

Fair Director Mary Clare Boyd says of the event, “Be prepared for a truly eclectic mix of pieces for sale, beyond what you might imagine an antique fair could sell. There are fashion drawings, 1950s Cartier earrings, Asprey Cocktail shakers, Warhol prints, Lalique glass, 18th-century oak dressers, enormous chrome binoculars and 17th-century marriage portraits. It is a wonderful source of one-off Christmas presents at different prices and the experience is one of pre-Christmas luxury and sparkle with a host of experts on hand to learn from.”

The fair is organized in association with the UK’s top trade associations, BADA and LAPADA. Every piece on sale is strictly checked by experts before the fair opens to ensure it is authentic so visitors can buy with confidence.

New for the 2014 edition is an enhanced events program which includes: “A Victorian Obsession Bringing the Pérez Simón collection to Leighton House Museum,” a talk by Daniel Robbins, Senior Curator at Leighton House. This is a preview taster to the much anticipated exhibition at Leighton House in mid-November. There are two Asian lectures at the fair, one by the British Museum (Ming: Beyond Porcelain) and one by specialist Arthur Millner (Asiatic themes in Mamluk and Ottoman Tiles from Damascus (1400-1800). The annual BADA talk is “Over the Top? The Image of War” by Andrew Sim. For the first time at the November fair, independent art consultant Vanessa Curry will be conducting specialist daily tours.

Incorporating a Mosimanns Bistro and champagne bar and with stylish presentation, this is a glamorous annual event with a sparkling preview night.

Online: www.olympia-antiques.com

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Emperor’s frescoed rooms unveiled for first time in Rome

Fresco paintings inside the House of Augustus, his residence during his reign as emperor Maison d'Auguste. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

ROME – Lavishly frescoed rooms in the houses of the Roman Emperor Augustus and his wife Livia are opening for the first time to the public on Thursday, after years of painstaking restoration.

The houses on Rome’s Palatine hill where the emperor lived with his family are reopening after a 2.5 million euros ($11.82 million) restoration to mark the 2,000 anniversary of Augustus’s death – with previously off-limit chambers on show for the first time.

From garlands of flowers on Pompeian red backgrounds to majestic temples and scenes of rural bliss, the rooms are adorned with vividly colored frescoes, many in an exceptional condition.

Restorers said their task had been a complex one, with bad weather during excavation threating the prized relics of a golden era in the Eternal City.

“We had to tackle a host of problems which were all connected, from underground grottos to sewers – and I’m talking about a sewer system stretching over 35 hectares [86 acres],” Mariarosaria Barbera, Rome’s archaeological superintendent, told AFP.

To protect the site, tourists will have to book to join one of three daily groups of up to 20 people who will be taken around by a guide for a 15-minute visit.

Cinzia Conti, head restorer, said the plan was to allow people to enjoy “a more intimate, more attentive exploration of Augustus’s spaces.”

It will also mean “we restorers can keep an eye on and evaluate the consequences of the public walking through, for example the dust on their shoes and especially their breath,” she said.

Augustus’s decision to build his “domus” near a grotto where Romans worshipped Romulus – one of the twins who legend has it founded Rome – was no coincidence.

The complex was intended to symbolize not only his power but that of his wife and adviser Livia, who is said to have wielded great influence over him and went on to play an important role in Roman politics after his death.

“Looking at the houses, the buildings he had built, we understand he was a man of power, of great strength, who knew what went into making a political man at the head of such a big empire,” Conti said.

The frescoes in Livia’s house in particular are one of the most important examples of the period’s style, according to Barbera.

The founder of the Roman Empire was born Caius Octavius in 63 B.C. on the Palatine hill. The great-nephew of Julius Caesar, he was adopted as his son shortly before the latter was assassinated.

Caius Octavius went on to rule over Rome for 40 years, during which the Republic experienced an era of great wealth and relative peace.

Livia, the love of his life, was his third wife, whom he married when she was pregnant with her first husband’s child. He adopted the baby, Tiberius, who would succeed him after his death.

Augustus died aged 75, after which the Senate raised him to the status of a god and appointed Livia his chief priestess.

As part of the 2,000 year celebrations, the Palatine Museum has dedicated a room to Augustus with objects connected to his life on show.

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