The Reagans attracted more bids than Mick Jagger.
Phillips’ First Internet Event Reaps $1.95 Million
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND – A sum of £1.3 million was the hammer total realized at Phillips’ annual Scottish Sale in Edinburgh on August 25 and 26 – with help from the Auction Channel.
For the first time in Scotland, live Internet bidding was available to buyers via the Auction Channel’s NetBidLive. A total of £30,510 was spent by interactive buyers from Orkneys to Kent and from Fife to Bath, as well as abroad, from Amsterdam to Connecticut. Fifty-two registrants participated in the live auction remotely.
High Internet activity was recorded throughout the sale on over 70 lots as varied as armorial plates, silverware, vintage whiskies, furniture and paintings.
Highlights from interactive sales included ten engraved armorial plates by Robert Douglas of “The Peerage of Scotland,” which sold to a bidder in London for £160. The same buyer also purchased two Georgian silver soup ladles for £379 and a silver teapot for £280.
Whiskey lots were also very attractive to interactive buyers. A 19-year-old Oban Manager’s Dram was purchased by an Oban bidder for £230. In the furniture section, a pair of Seventeenth Century carved walnut Restoration period standard chairs were heavily disputed in the room and over the Internet. A sum of £2,300 from a bidder in Reading won the lot.
The picture section proved most successful. Online bidders spent more than £25,000 and also were the direct underbidders for many of the star lots. Highlights included Edward Atkinson Hornel’s (1864-1933) “Geisha Girls Taking Tea” (est £10/15,000), which sold for £11,000, and Elizabeth Blackadders’ (1931- ) “Tulips” (est £4/6,000), which reached £9,800. Edward Hargitt’s “Barley Field and Storm Clouds” (est £600/800) realized £1,000 from a bidder in Fearn, and “Military Manoeuvres” by William Kennedy sold to a Reading buyer for £2,100.
It was noted that bidders in cyberspace were confident to compete remotely for higher-priced rdf_Descriptions, such as a work by the famous Scottish colorist Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell (1883-1937) whose “The Clachan” was bid up to £28,000 by an interactive bidder and sold in the room for £39,000. An oil by George Henry (1858-1943) was bid by the same buyer to £33,000 and sold in the room for £47,000.
