The Grange Festival has partnered with a team of professionals to host major fundraising auctions.

Olympia Auctions will help the organisers with the events in spring and early summer, which will play a crucial part in repairing the financial damage caused by Covid.

Sellers commission will be reduced from 15 per cent to 10 per cent. Olympia will donate half of this lower rate to the festival, and sellers are also encouraged to choose to donate a portion of the sale amount.

Michael Chance, artistic director of The Grange Festival commented: “The funds received by The Grange Festival will be used to help with the extreme challenges we have faced over the past year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and help fulfil a long-held dream to equip the theatre at The Grange to match the needs of the 21st century.

“Being able to film our work to a high standard will have a game-changing impact on our work with students and schoolchildren in our community and further afield. We will also reach so many at home and abroad who are unable to come to our theatre.

“All of this requires digital resources, a fact that has hit home even more powerfully while our theatres are closed.”

The auctions will take place as follows: British and Continental Pictures and Prints on Wednesday April 28; European and Asian Works of Art on Wednesday May 26; and Arms, Armour and Militaria on Wednesday June 30.

Olympia Auctions are inviting a range of consignments of all prices.

Recent consignments include ‘A Portrait of a Young Man’, a circle of Godfrey Kneller, an Elizabethan silver-encrusted sword rapier and a fine cased pair of flintlock duelling pistols by Joseph Manton. The auctions can be followed online here.

The Grange Festival’s 2021 season is set to start in June 2021 where they will present Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rossini’s La Cenerentola, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, and more.