As the weather takes a turn for the worst and the sun sets sooner in the day, hats coats and scarves are layered up over thick jumpers and try their best to keep us warm. At Reindeer antiques, the Christmas tree is up in the window and, this year, is surrounded by some of the finest Comic Art prints on Kensington Church Street.Eager to welcome back a firm favourite, we are delighted to hang many of Annie Tempest's original watercolours and prints on our walls. Full of wit and good humour and renowned for its weekly appearance in Country Life, the artwork from Tempest's series Tottering By Gently is sure to put a smile on your face.

SALLY ARNUP'A Life in Bronze'To visit Sally Arnup in her Yorkshire studio is to enter an enchanted world. The first thing you encounter is the sheer vitality of an artist who has been creating extraordinary sculptures continuously since leaving the Camberwell School of Art in the late 1950s. The second thing you encounter is the menagerie with which she shares her home, one barn owl, three Tawney owls, a long eared rabbit, a flock of sheep, a brood of chickens and an excitable English pointer called Phidias. Let there be no doubt about it, Sally Arnup adores animals and birds and it is this passion that fires her creativity and inspires her work.

An Afternoon of Georgian History and Hospitality

Eat Drink & Be Merry: History and Hospitality Combine in a New Selling Exhibition

Autumn Exhibition: A Sporting Miscellany

Reindeer Antiques, Issac and Ede & Jason Sandeberg

 

'Am I not a Man and a Brother?', cameo released by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787. Image copyright: British Museum.

The stick-back, comb-back, or as it is more widely known, the Windsor chair, is one of the most recognisable items of furniture in existence. It is also undeniably English, originating in the Chilterns and Thames Valley region around Windsor (hence the name), the latter becoming a central hub for the trade. A true Windsor chair is defined by its construction; while many chair types employ continuous stiles that form both back support and back leg in a single piece, all of the supporting stiles on a Windsor chair are dowelled into the seat piece, which is thus the central connecting section of the whole chairOne of the earliest surviving records for the production of Windsor chairs comes from the accounts of Lord Stanhope, who acquired a set of ‘Forrest’ chairs in the 1720s for Chevening House in Kent. Several dozen of these, named for their painted decoration and external use, were inventoried among his garden tools and wheelbarrows, and for good reason. Early examples like these would have been made by carpenters whose trade was otherwise dominated by the construction of cart wheels, wheelbarrows, and other utility objects. They were, and remain, similarly utilitarian; light and portable on account of their skeletal back rests, and often painted with resistant, lead-based green or grey paints to weatherproof the wood, though early makers also advertised them unpainted; “in the wood”.

Some of you may be reading about the recent sale of a painting made in 1932, by the American artist William Robinson Leigh, entitled 'Home Sweet Home'. In fact, the work, which sold for $1.195 million on the 5th November, beat the artist's previous sale record and thrust his name further up the list of auction highlights for 2011. It also continues the growing trend for pre-war American landscape painters that reflects an all too tardy desire to understand and interrogate the turbulent history of the USA.

A look at the cultural politics behind the continuing rise in auction-house sale records