The tenth Cotswold Art & Antiques Dealers’ Association Fair (CADA), sponsored by Hallett Independent, to Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park in Warwickshire CV35 9HZ from Thursday 13 to Sunday 16 October.

CADA members, together with a few guest exhibitors make up an exciting roster of expert dealers across a broad spectrum of traditional and decorative antiques. A bonus for visitors is the opportunity to see Compton Verney’s own gallery exhibitions.

CADA members making a debut this time Houlston with vernacular oak, textiles and 16th to 18th century European items combined with more eclectic choices. Coming to the Fair at Compton Verney are a Charles II silk on linen needlework picture featuring Father Time holding an hour glass flanked by Truth (Justice) holding scales and Victory (Fame) holding a palm frond with numerous animals, birds and insects all underneath a verse line, c.1670, £5,850 and also a fine limewood bust of the Virgin & Child in the manner of Tilman Riemenschneider (c.1460-1531), from Upper Swabia, most probably Ulm, c.1490-1520. £12,500.

Catesbys, the other debut exhibitor CADA member, is showing hand coiled stoneware by studio potter Paul Philp (b.1941). Now in his eighties, Philp has worked for over 50 years building his ceramics by hand, each piece undergoing multiple high-temperature firings to create the distinctive surface patination for which he is known. Philp’s work can be found in several international museums and was shown at The Grosvenor House Antiques Fair in London in the nineties.

Specialist in original prints from the 15th to 21st centuries, Elizabeth Harvey-Lee is also selling the work of an octogenarian artist. Aged 87, Jeff Clarke RE (b.1935) still works and experiments with techniques in his studio creating prints and etchings. He settled in Oxford in 1950 to take up a part-time teaching post at Oxford School of Art, now part of Oxford Brookes. In 1979-80, Clarke was appointed as draughtsman to the British School of Archaeology in Athens and made the first of several regular summer visits through the eighties to Crete, to record Minoan pots found in that season’s dig at Knossos, some of which are available to buy this October alongside Hinksey Allotment Fence (Oxford) an original etching from 1982, £250.

Other items for sale of local Cotswolds interest include a John & William Ridgway earthenware well-and-tree meat dish, transfer-printed in blue with a view of All Souls College and St Mary’s Church, Oxford from the Oxford and Cambridge College series, c.1820-30, £850 from David Scriven Antiques. Sarah Colegrave has a framed watercolour Evening, Brimscombe Hill by Henry Arthur Payne RWS (1868-1940), £1,500 and A Cotswold Stonebreaker by Charles March Gere RA, RWS (1884-1963), oil on canvas, £4,000, which depicts Painswick stonemason, Percy Musty accompanied by his dog Patch, working on the wall of a building near Paradise, a small hamlet about half a mile north of Painswick.

From Renaissance and Baroque period specialist Mayflower Antiques comes an extremely rare silver and parcel gilt Nuremberg bratina, marked for Nuremberg 1630 to 1636, maker’s mark for Hans Weber (1588-1634); the owner’s name ‘Magdelena Mengelin 1631’ engraved around the gilt rim, £17,000. Also on the stand is another very rare piece, a Gujarat mother of pearl goblet with English silver mounts with engraved initials, c.1680, £24,000 and an early 17th century large Reticello glass goblet from Venice, POA.

Georgian and Regency furniture specialist W.R. Harvey & Co. (Antiques) Ltd also has earlier pieces, a few of which are coming to the CADA Fair like an important William and Mary period burr walnut fall front escritoire, c.1690, £25,000. For those with plenty of room there is a very good Chippendale period mahogany breakfront library bookcase, c.1765, £27,500. The pattern of 15 pane glazing bars as seen on this example are clearly illustrated in Thomas Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director first
published in 1754. Smaller items include a George II period mahogany foldover top card table of rectangular form, c.1750, £3,450 and a George I period burr walnut kneehole desk, c.1720, £12,500.

A piece of furniture often needs a rug on the floor. Legge Carpets has a mouthwatering selection of carpets and rugs, as well as other textiles like a 19th century Uzbek silk ikat robe, priced in the region of £3,000. Ikat weaving is a highly complicated, skilled process. This and the use of valuable materials meant that these robes were seen as status symbols and markers of wealth and social standing. Legge Carpets is also bringing a rare pair of tree asmalyks made around the middle of the 19th century by a member of the Yomut, one of the major Turkoman tribes, priced in the region of £5,000.

Neil Schofield, who deals in Modern British art, joined CADA and exhibited at the Fair at Compton Verney last year. He is bringing Picking Flowers watercolour and ink on thick paper by Ukrainian born artist Bernard Meninsky (1891-1950), c.1940s, £6,500. Meninsky attended Liverpool School of Art and Slade School of Art and became tutor of life drawing at Westminster School of Art. Following his death, a Meninsky memorial exhibition was organised by the Arts Council in 1951–52. Boxing clever is Mark Goodger Antiques with an abundance of antique boxes for a multitude of occasions. Highlights include an exquisite miniature shagreen & sterling silver spoon box containing 12 teaspoons, 2 mote spoons and a pair of sugar tongs, maker TC, English, circa 1765, £6,950.

Some returning guest exhibitors include Matthew Holder European Works of Art with a rare pair of late 17th century marriage cutlery from northern Germany, £14,500. Given as a wedding gift to the couple whose images surmount the knife and fork, the handles represent a fashionably dressed newlywed couple, carved from translucent Baltic amber, whilst the faces and hands are carved from opaque amber. On the subject of marriage, Shaw Edwards Antiques has a monumentally sized dug-out oak armchair constructed with a cupboard below the seat, possibly a marriage piece given the two carved initials, c.1780-1800, £4,950. Joanna Booth brings more European items from the 17th century: Two Putti with palms, circle of Carracci, red chalk on paper, Italian, £3,500 and a near pair of green painted and gilded Spanish mirrors, £2,800 the pair.

Amongst the guest exhibitors is Jacksons Antique, exhibiting for the first time at this event, with Black Forest pieces and Oriental antiques, including an exceptional Black Forest twin bear carved wood fruit bowl, c.1890, £2,250. There is also a magnificent Japanese Meiji period bronze pheasant signed by Genryusai Seiya 源龍斎誠谷造, priced at £13,500, and a Satsuma sleeve vase signed with the four character mark for Kizan and the Shimazu Mon crest, £2,250. It is beautifully decorated with multiple
scenes overlaying a background scene featuring a vast landscape. The individual scenes depict various Bijin in processional ceremonies with children and other figures.

There is so much more to discover with jewellery from Howards Jewellers and clocks of varying shapes and sizes from antique clock dealer Tobias Birch, not least an ebony basket top table timepiece with pull quarter repeat by Nathaniel Hodges, London, 12” (30cm) high, circa 1685, priced around £15,000-£25,000 and a mahogany round dial wall timepiece with 12 inch convex dial signed G. Spiegelhalter & Co, Whitechapel, London with blued steel hands, 14” (35cm) high, circa 1830, £3,250. For the garden, Architectural Heritage brings an unusually restrained, but rather elegant example of a lead cistern, dated 1796 with initials I I and other small embellishments alongside the prominent date, £6,800.

CADA member Strachan Fine Art is looking forward to returning to Compton Verney and is planning to put a smile on the faces of visitors to the stand with paintings, drawings and sculpture with a note of humour by witty exponents like William Rushton (1937-1996), William Heath Robinson (1872-1944), Rowland Emett OBE (1906-1990), Martin Honeysett (1943-2015) and also Ronald William Fordham Searle (1920-2011) with his original illustrations for Slightly foxed - but still desirable, published Souvenir Press, London 1989, and a signed lithograph (ed: 10/150) A bigger slash - Hommage à David Hockney, 1984, £3,500 including ARR.

Not so amusing, as not much seems to have changed over the decades when there were still a lot of ‘displaced persons’ in Europe in the late fifties, are Ronald Searle’s illustrations when he and his wife at the time, Kaye Webb, were commissioned by the UN high commissioner for refugees to produce a book Refugees 1960: A Report in Words and Drawings published by Penguin in 1960. Assyrian refugees, Aigaleo, Athens is a signed, inscribed and dated pencil, pen, brown ink and felt tip pen illustration (numbered 37), November 1959, £3,500 including ARR and Hungarian children, Traiskirschen Transit Camp, Austria, a pen and brown ink illustration, signed, numbered 3, inscribed and dated 3 November 1959, £3,200 from Strachan Fine Art.

Compton Verney Art Gallery is situated in a Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown designed landscape with sheep, a lake, impressive trees and that is all before you arrive at the building in which the CADA Fair is situated on the ground floor. Above the Fair, visitors can enjoy a new display Portrait Miniatures: Highlights from the Grantchester Collection, showcasing over 40 exquisite and intriguing miniatures from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, many of which have never previously been seen by the public. The collection,
developed by the late Lady Grantchester, sister of Compton Verney’s founder Sir Peter Moores, was gifted to Compton Verney in 2019.

Also available to visit is Magnum Photos: Where Ideas are Born. This fascinating exhibition goes in search of the places where creativity takes shape and where ideas are born – the artist’s studio. The show brings together more than 20 famous photographers from the world-renowned Magnum photography agency and includes over 60 photo portraits of the artists who created art history in the 20th century, amongst which are Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Ai Weiwei and Yayoi Kusama all seen in their creative environments. A restaurant serving hot meals and refreshments, together with the art galleries and free parking, a trip to south Warwickshire assures a lovely day out shopping and viewing beautiful things.

WR Harvey Antiques - William and Mary period burr walnut fall front escritoire, £25,000  

Neil Schofield - Alan Reynolds 'Evening II' POA

Admission: Entry to the fair is free over all four days. Simply register on the website www.thecada.org to receive complimentary tickets for two people. In addition, Compton Verney is kindly allowing the Fair’s ticket holders access to all its galleries and exhibitions for a special price of £7.50.

To register for a complimentary ticket for two people, visit www.cotswolds-antiques-art.com or email info@thecada.org