US

A selection of 10 stand-out jewellery lots offered at auction in February-April 2019.

A record for a female Old Master and a Rubens with a royal connection was not quite enough to heat up bidding across the latest Old Master auction series in New York this winter.

Included in Cordier Auctions’ large mixed-discipline sale to be held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9 will be a group of four clocks that once came from the Chicago dealer Lee Benkendorf.

This mid-19th century cruet stand is one of several lots of English silver to be offered by Clarke Auction Gallery in Larchmont, New York, on February 10.

A small but select auction of just 44 lots of paintings spanning 500 years from Old Masters to 20th century works will go under the hammer at Freeman’s on February 27.

A “legendarily rare first edition” of the first book to describe the workings of a stock exchange sold at a high-estimate $300,000 (£238,095) in the days leading up to Christmas.

An auction record for a British coin was set in New York when a 1703 Vigo five guineas piece sold at $900,000 (£703,000) – $1.08m (£845,000) including premium. The sale was conducted by Baldwin’s of St James’s as part of The New York Premier Sale in Manhattan on January 13.

The precise function of the series of English tin-glazed earthenware seated cat jugs common to the 1650s-70s is unknown but, as many are dated and initialled, they may have been given as marriage or betrothal gifts.

Sales of ski posters have long been a seasonal feature of the auction scene scheduled for those winter months when enthusiasts take to the slopes.

The sale of a family collection of British and American art and antiques assembled by three successive generations of South Carolina enthusiasts will go under the hammer through Childress Gaffney auctions in Greenville on February 9.

A two-in-one purchase, this Simon and Halbig bisque-headed doll comes with its own teddy bear in a 550-lot online-only auction of toys and past playthings.

A work once said to have “…set the course for the modern world by its effective destruction of the anthropocentric view of the universe” made a rare auction appearance.

'Across the Continent. Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way' is a well-known hand coloured litho print issued by Currier & Ives, although the publisher’s imprint has been cut off the bottom of the example shown below.

Groucho, Harpo and Chico are shown below in Al Hirschfield’s original cover artwork for 'Why a Duck?', a profusely illustrated work about the Marx Brothers edited by Richard J Anobile and published in 1971.

Gerald Brockhurst (1890-1978) was already an established etcher when his captivating canvases of society women catapulted him to fame during the interwar years.