Sold on thesaleroom.com: an illustration from The Lost World, a Stobwasser snuff box and the vision of a Flemish missionary in China

An illustration from Conan Doyle’s The Lost World

It was estimated at £40-60 but this 14 x 10in (35 x 25cm) pen and ink by New-Zealand-born artist Harry Rountree (1878-1950) sold for £2600 at David Lay in Penzance on September 17.

Fully signed, is one of the original grisaille illustrations created for Conan Doyle's sci-fi classic The Lost World. The story of an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon basin where prehistoric beasts still survive has spawned many films (the first in 1925).

However, it was originally published serially in the Strand Magazine during the months of April-November 1912 with Rountree supplying the illustrations.

A £20,000 Stobwasser snuff box

In its pomp, the ‘lacquerware manufactory’ founded by the Stobwasser family in Brunswick in 1763 employed more than 50 people creating a wide range of papier-mâché and toleware luxuries.

The signature Stobwasser production was the flat circular table snuff box decorated with miniature reproductions of popular Italian, French and Dutch paintings of the period.

They were much imitated but most are signed inside with a distinctive red script, often with pattern number and sometimes with a subject name.

Some are by recognised German artists who learned their trade at the Stobwasser painting school run by the Brunswick landscape artist Pascha Johann Friedrich Weitsch (1723-1803), and his son Friedrich Georg Weitsch (1758-1828).

Examples make periodic appearances at auction. However, few generate quite the reaction of the 10cm box signed Stobwasser sche Fabrik in Braunschweig and numbered 887 offered for sale at Bamfords in Derby on September 11.

Part of a collection of snuff and other boxes, it was decorated with a vignettes titled Vue du jardin du Palais-Royal près de la rotonde. A pen and ink of the same composition and title by Paris artist Charles-François Muller (1789-1855) resides in the Musée Carnavalet.

The box (with a chip to the base) was guaranteed to find many admirers at the estimate of £200-300 but the auctioneers were shocked to see pre-sale bidding via thesaleroom.com had jumped to £16,000 by the morning of the sale.

Two collectors from Germany had locked horns and neither was quite finished. Bidding again during the sale, the hammer fell to an online bidder from Brunswick at £20,000.

A painting by Mon Van Genechten

Before leaving as a missionary to China, the Flemish missionary Mon Van Genechten (1903-74) was a student of Dirk Baksteen, Sir Frank Brangwijn and Maurice Denis.

In Beijing he was assigned the post of professor in the arts at the Catholic University and practiced Chinese painting under the guidance of the scholar-artist Pu Xinyu. He took Chinese name Fang Xisheng. Christian subject matter painted in the Chinese style came to define his oeuvre.

This typical 1.14 x 80cm ink and colour on paper scene signed and dated ‘Peking 1939’ is typical.

At the Belgium saleroom Coronari Auctions in Nazareth on September 4, it sold at €8000 (£7270) – many times the €250-500 estimate.