Fine Art

Dealer Michael Shapiro’s exhibition of Modernist photography showcases works capturing a fundamental shift in style.

While furniture and books fully justified its title, The Oxford Library Sale at Mallams (22.5% buyer’s premium) was led by a surprise star: a rather lowly regarded gesso bust of the sort that would have been a minor decoration to such a room.

As well as painting sunny pictures of children on the beaches of Cornwall, Dorothea Sharp (1874-1955) frequently turned her paintbrush to still-lifes.

The Victorian artist John Bagnold Burgess (1829- 97), grandson of a painter who counted Thomas Gainsborough among his pupils, was best known as a painter of genre scenes.

Shin-hanga, meaning ‘new prints’, emerged in Japan during the early 20th century. Aimed at Western tastes, the artistic movement combined the traditional colourful woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e with nostalgic and romanticised Japanese subjects.

Modestly catalogued as English School, 1960s, a Modern British study of a head emerged as one of the top-selling pictures at Sworders (25% buyer’s premium) in Stansted Mountfitchet.

A sale at Oise Enchères yielded a strong price for a bronze by the French sculptor Louis Hottot (1829-1905).

Retired headteacher Mark Prentice specialises in prints and paintings.

Among several paintings by David Bomberg (1890-1957) that Beaux Arts London sold at London Art Fair (LAF) was an oil, 'Portrait of Dinora' (1952), offered for £70,000.

This large and imposing portrait of Pauline Bonaparte, the younger sister of Napoleon, sold for$310,000 (£238,700) in New York last week.

'Connect: London’s Independent Art Fair' wrapped up its second edition earlier this month, staking its place in the calendar of early fairs around the capital with rising sales and evolving strategies for organisation and selling.

The latest Impressionist & Modern auctions in London posted the lowest total for a February series in this category for a decade.

This early-20th century snow scene, below, was painted by the French artist Paul Elie Gernez (1888-1948). He was primarily a naturalist painter of still-lives, landscapes and seascapes, and spent much of his life in Honfleur in Normandy.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales including a Walter Greaves Thames scene.

Drawings by two later followers of the Pre-Raphaelites drew competition at separate regional salerooms.

Eight-strong group by the artist-plantsman provides market pointer for his post-1930s work

This 14 x 10¾in (35.5 x 27cm) oil on canvas by Eugène Boudin (1824-98) will feature in Freeman’s sale of European Art and Old Masters in Philadelphia on February 18.