Auctioneers

Two lost folios from the 'Yongle Dadian', the Ming dynasty encyclopaedia that has assumed national treasure status in China, surfaced for sale in Paris last week.

A US collector is the new owner of a 5000-year-old tablet that contains the earliest-known record of any personal name in history.

Whoever H Twyman was, his talents as a craftsman are beyond doubt.

English Civil War group The John Hampden Society has bought a lock of hair thought to be from the head of its eponymous patron.

A 19th century doll’s house sold for £8500 at North Yorkshire saleroom Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) – but its real appeal came from what was inside.

The market for traditional British and Continental ceramics did not lie idle for three months. As ATG reports, a renewed enthusiasm greeted the first major UK sale since lockdown

A group of seven works from a private collection by René Charles Pierre Princeteau (1843-1919) appeared at the Roseberys sale on June 4, all of them selling for a combined £72,100. Interest was reported from France, Belgium and the US.

The New Hall China Manufactory holds an important place in the history of English porcelain. Active from 1781-1835, it was effectively a cooperative between several Staffordshire earthenware makers, who acquired the Bristol porcelain patent and financed a factory together, first at Tunstall and then at Shelton New Hall in Hanley.

The Rijksmuseum was in action at the Drouot to carry off a 9½in (24cm) wide porcelain punchbowl from the Ansbach factory.

Bonhams will sell the third tranche of a substantial private collection of Meissen on July 22. It includes a number of Böttger stonewares with this 4in (10cm) head of the Emperor Vitellius, c.1710-13, estimated at £4000-6000.

Large, bold and decorative, transfer-printed pottery footbaths have an appeal that goes beyond collectors of 19th century ceramics.

This rare 2in (5cm) English delftware ointment pot, c.1775, carries the inscription in manganese 'The Queen’s Dentifrice'.

The gilt decorated blue cloth binding showed signs of age, but a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s 'Captains Courageous, A Story of the Grand Banks' offered in a Philadelphia sale bore the author’s signature on the title-page.

Pitching a work at the right level is crucial to demand and price when it comes to selling unattributed or loosely ascribed Old Masters at auction.

Pictured here are five from a near-complete set of 41 polychrome terracotta figures of the Danse Macabre offered by Lempertz (25% buyer’s premium) in Cologne. They are typical of the work of Anton Sohn (1769-1841), who settled in Zizenhausen near Stockach in 1799.