Top stories this week – including a new antiques show from TV presenter Paul Martin

• Frances Allitt
  
• 30 Mar 2019

1) Former Flog It! presenter Paul Martin to launch new show 'Curiosity' next month

Paul Martin promoting his new show Curiosity. Image credit: BBC/Hungry Gap Productions/Jack Coathupe.

TV presenter Paul Martin is about to launch his new show ‘Curiosity’ as he juggles recruiting for his other show ‘Make Me A Dealer’ and running his new gallery in Wiltshire.

2) Garage sale-find Chinese bronze valued on US ‘Antiques Roadshow’ makes $1.7m at Sotheby’s auction

This gilt-bronze figure of Chinese Buddhist deity Chintamanicakra Avalokiteshvara from the late Tang Dynasty/Five Dynasties period sold for $2.1m (£1.6m) at Sotheby’s New York yesterday. It was bought at a garage sale for around $75-100 and had an upper estimate of £80,000.

A Chinese gilt bronze figure bought at a garage sale and appraised on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow sold in New York for $1.7m (£1.3m) – around 21 times its upper estimate and more than 17,000 times its original purchase price.

3) March mega-sleepers: Nine items that sold for more than 100-times estimate at auction

Catalogued as ‘mid 20th Century School’ this picture was estimated at £30-40 at Franklin Browns in Edinburgh on March 16.

The month of March produced an unusually large number of sleepers across the UK’s regional salerooms – from an Old Master drawing to a rare Marklin tinplate train.

4) Rediscovered Joseph Wright of Derby painting sold to major institution in roundup of further TEFAF sales

Joseph Wright of Derby’s Two Boys with a Bladder (1769-70) sold from Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker to a major institution.

An unpublished work by Joseph Wright of Derby’s is among the further sales reported from this year’s TEFAF Maastricht.

5) Nazi-looted painting seized by Adolf Hitler’s photographer finally handed back to heirs of original Jewish owners by German cathedral

The painting of the square and cathedral in the town of Xanten in the North Rhine-Westphalia region of Germany. A copy of a known work by the Dutch painter Jan van der Heyden, it has now been returned to the heirs of its original owners from whom it was seized by the Nazis.

A cathedral in Germany has returned a painting that was seized by the Nazis in 1941 to the heirs of its original Jewish owners.