The prestigious Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair, which opened to crowds on June 11 and runs here through June 17, was much changed in this, its 75th year. Some 20 exhibitors dropped out, including all but one of the dealers in Old Master paintings, which had been one of the show’s considerable strengths. (Instead, these dealers, including Johnny Van Haeften and Colnaghi/Bernheimer, have joined forces with Sotheby’s and Christie’s to put on a new event, Master Paintings Week, to be held July 4–10.)

In the Old Masters’s stead, the 90 or so remaining dealers, overwhelmingly British, emphasized 20th-century British paintings, an area that has grown in popularity in recent years, both in the market and at the fair. Among those showing works by artists such as Henry Moore, Bridget Riley, and Ben Nicholson were exhibitors Agnew’s, Whitford Fine Art, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, and Richard Green.

The fair also felt the absence of furniture dealers Norman Adams, Hotspur, and Jeremy — all of which have gone out of business in the past year — but there were strong offerings of furniture nonetheless. London dealer Antoine Chenevières booth was highlighted by an ebony Viennese desk made in 1805 for a castle in Poland and carrying a six-figure price. In the opening hours of the fair, Chenevière sold an iron Russian bear from 1865, four painted and carved Italian wood wall lights from the Borghese Palace from 1800, and a pair of Florentine console tables made of rosewood and gilded bronze with orange jasper tops. He declined to give prices.

Also notable among this year’s offerings were two vases made of blue john, a rare semiprecious mineral found only in a hillside near Castleton in Derbyshire. It is unusual to find even one large blue john piece in a fair, but two exhibitors had vases this year that have attracted much interest from potential buyers. Thomas Coulborn, a first-time exhibitor from the U.K.’s West Midlands, had a krater-form vase, circa 1815, that hails from a Mexican private collection. The vase, which is attributed to James Shore, who made a similar piece in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, has masks on the handles and measures just under 30 inches high, making it the second-largest known vase of its kind. (The largest is in the Natural History Museum in London.)

A blue john vase on Peter Petrous stand is smaller, measuring 24 inches, and is priced at £280,000 (about $460,000), versus Coulbourn’s £225,000. Asked about the price differential, Coulborn said, “We are doing our best to be competitive in a difficult market.” Coulbourn made quite a splashy debut with an enormous Swedish porphyry tazza on a stand, circa 1838, a gift from the King of Sweden to the British ambassador. The tazza, priced at £1.5 million ($2.4 million), won the fair’s “artifact of the year” award, but hadn’t yet sold as of ARTINFO’s visit.

London’s Finch & Co., one of several valiant galleries that exhibited simultaneously at Grosvenor House and its friendly rival Olympia, always has an eclectic and entertaining stand. This year it showed a 17th-century model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, made of olivewood, ebony, ivory, and mother-of-pearl, together with eight shrines. Priced at £65,000 ($107,000), it attracted huge interest, said Craig Finch, co-director of Finch & Co.

The Grosvenor House fair continues its attempts to become more up to date, or at least to evolve, with the addition of a dealer in movie posters (London’s Reel Poster Gallery) and a wine vendor (John Armit, of London). Many of the exhibitors accent their antiques-filled booths with contemporary pieces this year, with varying degrees of success. Looming over London gallery Malletts stand of 18th-century furniture, for example, was an armoire by young Dutch designer Tord Boontje from Mallet’s Meta line of contemporary furniture, a juxtaposition that was jarring at best.

The most successful integration was at the booth of London’s Fine Art Society, which wasn’t much of an integration at all: Earlier paintings lined the outside walls of the booth, and modern works the inside. But something there was working: a painting by Anne Redpath, Pink and Grey: Still Life (1942), sold for £230,000 ($378,000), and the Fine Art Society won this year’s award for the best booth in the fair.

As at Olympia, the mood at Grosvenor was upbeat, with dealers repeatedly uttering, like mantras, “Quality sells, if it’s priced right” and “People are buying decorative things.” Grosvenor House has plenty of both.