Sales in the UK
Last year the UK’s regional salerooms were treated to a generous handful of five- and six-figure bids for unappreciated masterworks of Aboriginal and Oceanian art – a Maori putorino or bugle flute sold to a French dealer for £140,000 at John Nicholson’s of Haslemere among them.
There’s no doubt that auctioneers and vendors are discovering that the UK’s country houses, furnished with the routine period objects that no longer generate great excitement, can occasionally yield valuable souvenirs of a colonial past.