The London Asian Art department sells a wide variety of fine and decorative art from throughout the Asian sub-continent at our salerooms in New Bond Street and Knightsbridge. Other Asian art is offered, less frequently, in specialised sales at our Edinburgh saleroom. Our London auctions include all artefacts from China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, the Himalayas and South-East Asia: artefacts from the Near and Middle East are handled by the separate Islamic and Indian Art Department at New Bond Street.

The Asian Department sales include a very extensive variety of Buddhist and secular artefacts created in a wide range of media. The finest Chinese art is sold at our New Bond Street saleroom, where our experienced staff have particular expertise in ceramics, jades and hardstone carvings, and works of art of most kinds. This is also the principal Bonhams auction centre for fine and rare Chinese Export porcelain, often sourced form old collections and houses throughout Europe, where it has sometimes remained since arriving in Europe two or three centuries ago; Export porcelain decorated with the armorial bearings of European families is a particular specialty. Increasingly, fine Japanese art (notably swords, prints, paintings and Meiji-period craft products including ivory okimono and netsuke, lacquer objects and inro, and later ceramics) is offered in the quarterly specialised Asian art sales held at our Knightsbridge saleroom, where the department head is the Bonhams Japanese art specialist for Europe.

There are currently three sales each year at New Bond Street, with items normally estimated approximately at or above £1500, with some items reaching well into six figures - such as the blue and white ‘Palace’ bowl, Chenghua period (1465-1487) which sold for over £900,000 from the Cunliffe Collection. In March it is now a tradition that we assemble an auction of Decorative Asian art and Chinese Export porcelain.

Following this, there are two major auctions each year, the first in June/July, the second in November as a key element of the international event ‘Asian Art in London’, in which Bonhams plays a prominent role. In recent years the New Bond Street Asian department has successfully attracted single-owner sales and important Chinese art consignments from a number of prominent old European collections, including the heirs of Carl Kempe, the second Baron Cunliffe, Mr and Mrs R.H.R Palmer, and from the well-known authority Anthony du Boulay

At Knightsbridge, there are normally four specialist Asian art sales each year, held in March, May/June, September and December. Each of these large and varied sales usually contains over 400 lots, which we expect to range in price from about £500-5,000. These sales are particularly heavily viewed on our website by Asian buyers, since the busy schedule of sales at Knightsbridge means that catalogues are distributed closer to the sale date than at New Bond Street.

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Posted: 10|22|07 at 12:03 pm. Filed under: Auction News.