International

THE State of California has recently begun to strictly enforce a law banning the sale of ivory regardless of age. Dealers and auctioneers offering antiques made from ivory or including ivory among their constituent parts have had merchandise seized.

ATG Media, parent company of Antiques Trade Gazette has been named as one of the Top 100 companies in Europe in the Red Herring Awards, which celebrate innovation and technology in business.

IT was the five o’clock shadow that gave it away. When London dealer Philip Mould spotted this 18th century portrait in a general paintings sale at the New York auctioneers Thomas Cornell Galleries in November last year, he thought it to be of a rather masculine middle-aged lady.

WORKERS restoring an 18th century house in St Petersburg have unearthed an extraordinary cache of Tsarist-era artefacts once owned by one of Russia’s most prominent noble families.

LEADING US regional saleroom Skinner are to launch an online-only auction platform.

SOTHEBY’S concluded their latest Hong Kong series of sales on April 4, raising a premium-inclusive total of over HK$2.46bn (£212.5m) for the eight sales containing over 2780 lots.

LARGE new gallery spaces in Hong Kong look set to provide the battleground in the competition for private treaty sales between Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

NEW York has just seen the greatest dispersal ever of Jewish coins and coins relating to the history of the Jewish people.

IT may sound a little gimmicky, but one of the most captivating TEFAF exhibits this year was an animated version of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Vase With Flowers in a Window by the contemporary artists Rob and Nick Carter on the stand of London’s Fine Art Society.

TOTAL auction sales in France rose by 8.6 per cent in 2011 to €2.38bn. Art, antiques and other collectors' sales accounted for just over half that figure at €1.25bn, a record total that surpassed the boom years of 2006 and 2007, as well as 2009 when the Yves St Laurent sale at Christie's in Paris gave a huge boost in what was otherwise a lacklustre year.

THE incomparable TEFAF Maastricht opened to the usual streams of visitors at the Maastricht Exhibition and Congress Centre but, unusually for the Dutch fair, an early big ticket sale came for a British picture.

FOUR centuries of social, commercial and military history dictate that South Africa is just occasionally the source of rare European antiques and works of art.

CHICAGO-based auctioneers Leslie Hindman are to open a new auction facility in Denver, Colorado.

THE term ‘masterpiece’ is all too commonplace in auctioneering hyperbole, but just occasionally it rings true.

THE two Tiffany works of art that gave strong performances within days of each other in recent US sales were not the usual lamps, glassware or table silver.

ON April 30, Philadelphia auctioneers Freeman’s will sell flags from the U.S. Navy’s most revered ship, the Constitution.

AXA Art are offering a substantial reward for the safe recovery of two archaeological fragments – a 5th century BC Persian low relief showing the head of a guard and a marble head dating from the Roman Empire – which were stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts during October 2011.

Dublin fine art auctioneers James Adam believe uncertainty regarding the euro has helped rather than hindered the Irish art market.

DETAILS have emerged of a brutal and ruthlessly executed robbery which saw two armed men break into the home of an elderly art dealer in Northern Ireland on January 3.