In Cambridge, Cheffins’ Fine Sales offer up a veritable feast of contemporary art, paintings, furniture, rugs, jewellery and silver – and while auction catalogues are available, nothing beats visiting the saleroom in person.
Over the last decade, the focus of the top London auction houses, Sotheby's and Christie's, has evolved away from the traditional middle-ground of art and antiques to focus on selling major paintings – particularly Impressionist and 20th-century art – and masterpiece antiques. If you only ever read about multimillion-pound Monets going under the hammer, or five-figure French commodes, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the auction world is an exclusive place, but nothing could be further from the truth, as the leading regional auction houses take up the slack. Increasingly, art and antiques below a value threshold of around £10,000 are being
