LONDON—Everyone loves to complain about the Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair. They fret about its venue, which is underground and cramped, and, some say, claustrophobic, but also about its very Englishness, the fact that it is a place to find brown furniture and grandfather clocks.

Yet, with 88 dealers, the fair, which was on in London last weekend from June 14-20, remains a world-class event and the one to beat. It is here that dealers bring the very, very best goods they have acquired and here that one can fine the best English furniture currently on the market.

If the works for sale span 5,000 years of art, the fair is also a place to find modern furniture and paintings, with an emphasis on mid-20th-century British artists, who are enjoying a moment in the sun. For some dealers, such as Johnny van Haeften, the world’s foremost dealer in Dutch Old Master paintings, the fair is a “showplace,” unlike Maastricht, “which is more commercial.” Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that someone hasn’t snapped up his magnificent Sea Storm, an oil on copper painting by Jan Brueghel the Younger. “There are only six or seven seascapes by Brueghel in private hands,” said van Haeften.

Moretti Fine Art, a first-time exhibitor at Grosvenor House, showed Italian Old Master paintings, the first time Renaissance Italian paintings have ever been shown at the fair. The star of his booth is a Canaletto view of Venice that once belonged to American collectors Jayne and Charles Wrightsman. It is priced at £8 million.

Koopman Rare Art had what Lewis Smith, the co-owner of the gallery, considered “the find of the fair,” a Charles II monumental silver-gilt sideboard dish that carries a “six-figure price.” The circular dish is chased in high relief with acanthus foliage, flower heads and tulips interspersed with birds and animals. It was made for Sir George Jeffreys (1645-1689) and bears his arms and those of his wife, Sarah Neesham, in the center. The dish is likely to go to an English museum.

Koopman has returned to the fair after a 15-year absence. “We are very happy to be back,” said Smith, and we have sold to lots of new young English clients. We should have come back earlier.”

Clocks, of course, sell very well as Grosvenor House, which is why there are so many to be seen. Ronald Phillips had two booths, one for clocks and one for furniture. The gallery sold a previously unrecorded ebony-veneered clock by Thomas Tompion (ca. 1688), to an American museum for £420,000. John Carlton-Smith had red dots all over his booth. Among the clocks he sold was a rare Charles II silver mounted table clock (ca. 1675).

Marks Antiques reported sales of Faberge to “the usual suspects.” Among the pieces sold were two cloisonne boxes made by workmaster Fedor Ruckert, one of them an exquisite enamel and silver gilt pictorial box depicting a courting couple.

Wartski also reported the sale of a Faberge samovar, to Russian buyers. But at the time of this writing, a miniature enameled gold chair by Faberge, modeled as a gondola chair with lyre and arrow supports, priced at £2 million, had not found a buyer.

Richard Philp, who deals in medieval and Renaissance works of art, had a spectacular booth, highlighted by an extraordinarily rare French oak sculpture of King Louis XII (ca. 1500) that retains much of its original polychrome. The figure, which carried an asking price of £28,000, was formerly in the Cloisters Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was sold to a collector very early on in the fair.

One had to be at the fair early to catch the stars of Philip Mould’s stand: four early 17th-century portraits of the young Ffolliott Brothers, painted by a regional English artist on oak panels. Much admired, the charming portraits sold fast, to “an overseas client for around £200,000.” Moulds also sold a very chic Augustus Johns portrait of a woman and a group portrait by George Romney.

Dealers reported seeing few Americans, and, unlike at the concurrent Olympia Fair, few designers. Their absence was not terribly surprising considering that it the exchange rate was close to $2 to the pound.

Some found sales subdued at the preview and gala opening, which they blamed on “fashion” and the way things are for most antiques at the moment. “These days it takes a longer time to sell,” said Jeremy Garfield-Davies, a director at Ronald Phillips. Nevertheless, the fair looked great with a new design by David Bentheim, focusing on the architecture of the historic Stowe house in Buckinghamshire, and the mood on the floor was decidedly upbeat.