Market Hill Antiques & Collectables

Market Hill Antiques & Collectables A true antiques shop in the picturesque market town of Clare, Suffolk. Offering a varied selection o

The reassessment came on 1 May 2026 and did exactly what we had predicted. The assessor repeated the foundry claim, this...
03/09/2026

The reassessment came on 1 May 2026 and did exactly what we had predicted. The assessor repeated the foundry claim, this time with a source: the digitised Berlin address books. Rosenthal & Maeder appeared in the bronze-wares trade advertisements in 1922 but not in 1919, “which appears to corroborate the date cited”. Peleschka-Lunard was dismissed in one sentence, on the basis that “later castings of an artist's work could be made”. And then the expected pivot: the figure now failed the value test too. It was “a work of higher quality” but “it is not unique”, and “the dating issues above do not alter this opinion”.
The corroboration was the undoing. The Berlin address books come in sections. One is a trade directory, arranged by category, where firms took entries and advertisements. Another is a street directory, arranged building by building, listing who occupied every address in the city. The assessor had searched the advertisements. Nobody had searched the streets. The street directory lists Rosenthal & Maeder at Dresdener Strasse from 1909 to 1915. The wording is identical to the 1922 trade entry the assessor had accepted as proof of activity in that one year, while refusing to accept the same wording as proof of the same activity earlier. The only thing that changes is the date, and the date is the whole dispute.
The second appeal, filed on 5 May 2026, made three points. The foundry dating was a plain error of fact, disproved by a full search of the very source the decision relied on. The posthumous-casting theory could not be disproved as the assessor used it: any sculptor who died before 1922 with a Rosenthal & Maeder mark simply becomes a posthumous casting, with or without evidence, when a business-directory entry for a trading firm is evidence of a live business, not a dead one. And the value assessment had been done on the wrong object: the assessor judged the piece as one of the mass commercial castings of the 1920s and found it unremarkable among them, but a pre-1915 work is not an example of 1920s popularity, it comes before it. Few pre-war chryselephantine figures survive, because the war ended their production.
The Government Legal Department's response was due by 3 June 2026. It came on 2 June: the appeal “will not be opposed”. Under Regulation 9 of the 2022 procedure regulations, the Secretary of State then had twenty-eight days to issue the certificate. It was awarded on 11 June 2026. Otto and his dancing lady are now legally recognised as an early Art Deco bronze and ivory dancing girl by Otto Hoffmann (two Fs, not one), about 1910, a pre-1918 item of outstandingly high artistic, cultural or historic value.
Well, there it is. Six and a half months, two refusals, two appeals, one contested hearing, a £250 fee and no order for costs, for a piece of paper with a few numbers and letters on it.
Next and probably the final chapter Saturday 5th September

In January the Government Legal Department got involved. Some of what followed was without-prejudice correspondence, so ...
01/09/2026

In January the Government Legal Department got involved. Some of what followed was without-prejudice correspondence, so I will leave it out. What is on the record is that on 22 January 2026, before its response to the appeal was even due, APHA gave notice withdrawing the original decision.
Withdrawing a decision normally kills the appeal with it, under Rule 17(6) of the tribunal's rules, “save for good reason”. That mattered, because the first refusal had turned entirely on dating. A fresh reassessment would be free to refuse again on the Act's other test, artistic value, where far more weight is given to the expert's judgment and an appeal is much harder to win. We said as much, and asked the tribunal to keep the appeal alive.
The question was heard remotely on 17 April 2026 before Judge O'Connor, the Chamber President. It was a narrow one. Not the sculpture, not the foundry, not the value test, only whether an appeal over a £250 certificate could continue once the decision behind it had been withdrawn. For that, the state instructed counsel, appearing for the Government Legal Department with its own lawyers behind him. A small auction house, representing itself, against government counsel, to decide whether the argument would even be heard. The agency's own position was that the figure was not special enough to certify. Its conduct suggested otherwise: whatever the dancer was worth, the point was worth a barrister.
We lost that round. Judge O'Connor found no good reason to keep the proceeding alive, noting among other things that our wasted costs so far were “likely to be minimal”, and the appeal fell with the withdrawn decision. But the notice he issued on 27 April 2026 is what won it for us in the end. The original refusal, he wrote, lacked clarity on value, with “no statement of conclusion directly linking these reasons to the section”, and what value reasoning could be inferred “draws significant dependence from the preceding conclusion” on dating, so that a finding for us on the date “will necessarily have an impact” on any reassessment of value. It reads like procedural tidying-up. In practice it shut off APHA's fallback before they could use it.
Next chapter Thursday 3rd September Only 2 more to go

Ours arrived on 24 November 2025. The figure, a bronze and ivory dancer signed O. Hoffmann with the Rosenthal & Maeder f...
30/08/2026

Ours arrived on 24 November 2025. The figure, a bronze and ivory dancer signed O. Hoffmann with the Rosenthal & Maeder foundry seal, had been assessed and turned down on dating.
The letter said “Otto Hoffmann is known to have been active during the inter-war years”, of a man consistently recorded as having died in 1915. Then came the claim the whole case turned on: the foundry was “active from the mid-1920s onwards”, so the figure was “much more likely” a 1920s posthumous casting. No source was given for those foundry dates. The letter even got the foundry's name wrong, writing Maeder as “Meeder”.
A refusal gives you twenty-eight days to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal. We appealed on 9 December, representing ourselves, on one simple point: the foundry claim was false, and everything else in the decision rested on it.
Our evidence included the settled auction-house view on Hoffmann's dates and the case of Franz Peleschka-Lunard, a sculptor working in Berlin around 1910 whose chryselephantine pieces carry the same Rosenthal & Maeder mark. If the firm only existed from the mid-1920s, its seal had somehow ended up on pre-war work.
Next chapter Tuesday 1st September

Under the Ivory Act 2018 it is a criminal offence to deal in ivory in the UK. The Act allows a few narrow exemptions, an...
28/08/2026

Under the Ivory Act 2018 it is a criminal offence to deal in ivory in the UK. The Act allows a few narrow exemptions, and the narrowest is section 2(2): an item made before 1918 that the Secretary of State accepts is of “outstandingly high artistic, cultural or historic value”. The trade calls it the Rembrandt clause, which tells you how high the bar is set.
You apply online, pay £250, and send photographs and evidence. The application goes to an expert assessor at a “prescribed institution”, a museum, whose name you are never given. You do not see the assessor's report. The decision letter quotes from it, and you take those quotes on trust. The first you hear of the expert's view is the refusal itself.
Next chapter Sunday 30th August

Through the 1980s and 1990s the market for antiques and Art Deco boomed, helped along by television programmes, the Mill...
26/08/2026

Through the 1980s and 1990s the market for antiques and Art Deco boomed, helped along by television programmes, the Miller's guides and a general appetite for owning something old. Museums started giving Art Deco ceramics and figures their own displays. One, in Salamanca, was given over entirely to Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
Around the turn of the millennium the mood shifted. Talk of tighter restrictions on ivory sales, aimed at protecting elephants, raised an awkward question for anyone holding historic pieces: what happens to something made a century earlier, long before any of this was a concern? The antiques trade said it had not been properly consulted, and argued the coming law would do nothing for animal welfare and was mostly red tape. Too late. It was law.
Then a gentleman walked into the consignment office carrying an Otto Hoffmann chryselephantine dancing girl and asked us to sell her, and we knew we had paperwork ahead of us. She was a lovely thing, signed O. Hoffmann to the base, with the early Rosenthal & Maeder foundry seal and dating to about 1910. We applied to DEFRA for the exemption certificate that would let us put her in the sale.
Next chapter Friday 28th August

By the 1960s fashion taste had moved on again, towards pop and psychedelia rather than the decorative pieces of earlier ...
25/08/2026

By the 1960s fashion taste had moved on again, towards pop and psychedelia rather than the decorative pieces of earlier generations. Then, at the end of the decade, the old objects started to come back into view. Bevis Hillier's 1968 book put the term Art Deco into common use, and through the 1970s collectors and academics went back and reassessed the whole style, with exhibitions and books treating it as a serious international movement.
That reassessment meant attributing work made decades earlier, and that is where the trouble starts. Some good sculptures were credited to Otto Hofmann, the Bauhaus-trained artist who studied in Dessau, rather than to Otto Hoffmann, the Berlin sculptor with the second F. It matters, because images filed under Hofmann appear to match known works by Hoffmann. One missing letter can rewrite the whole attribution. After all, what's an F between friends?
Next chapter Wednesday26th August

The war dragged on and everything was short: materials, food, people. Households were asked to hand over scrap metal for...
22/08/2026

The war dragged on and everything was short: materials, food, people. Households were asked to hand over scrap metal for the war effort, saucepans, railings, spare ornaments, anything that could be melted down. A bronze dancing girl was exactly the sort of thing that could end up in the melting pot for munitions.
The pre-war style had run its course anyway, and plenty of the objects once prized for it were broken up or thrown out. After the war the mood had changed. The new fascination was rockets and atomic power, and the ivory dancers of forty years earlier looked like relics.
Next chapter Monday 24th August

Art Deco's expansion and the return of warBy the 1920s the style we now call Art Deco had real momentum, helped by the o...
20/08/2026

Art Deco's expansion and the return of war
By the 1920s the style we now call Art Deco had real momentum, helped by the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 and the big Paris exhibition of 1925. Sculptors like Demetre Chiparus, Ferdinand Preiss and Bruno Zach built on what earlier figures such as Hoffmann's had started, and made their own bronze-and-ivory pieces for a new set of collectors.
By the 1930s it had reached America, with Miami its best-known example. The makers who had set the style going were mostly forgotten by then, their names crowded out by the ones who came after. Then war came again, and once more the materials of decorative sculpture were wanted for the war effort instead.
Next chapter Saturday 22nd August

Then came the war, and it changed everything. Bronze stopped being a material for ornament and became a military one. Be...
18/08/2026

Then came the war, and it changed everything. Bronze stopped being a material for ornament and became a military one. Berlin went from confident and prosperous to short of food and increasingly unstable, and in that climate nobody was thinking about decorative sculpture.
Hoffmann went to war. The records show only that he died in 1915. They do not say how, or where. What survives is the work, and in a short career he made some of the finest chryselephantine figures of the period.
Next chapter Thursday 20th August

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