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This rare sampler, just 6in (15cm) across, was completed by a girl from the Queens Orphan School in Van Diemen’s Land (the island of Tasmania) in 1838.

Exuding the exuberant confidence of pre-1914 Britain, this 21in (52cm) long silver table centrepiece, below, was a natural target for the London trade at the Anthemion (17.5% buyer’s premium) November 20 sale in Cardiff.

As with so many other businesses, art and antiques dealerships go into overdrive for the intense selling period up to Christmas. Here is a selection of five items from exhibitions and the latest catalogues.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

When this portrait of a young woman was first exhibited in the early 1930s, critics remarked on its “intensity and vital quality”, “the charming head” and the “wonderful life-like expression”.

Losses narrowed for stamps, coins and medals business Stanley Gibbons in the six months to September 30.

Old Masters are much to the fore in the calendar across Europe at this time in the auction season.

Personal devotional prayer books, known as a Book of Hours, were popular among the wealthy and powerful in late medieval Europe. Illuminated with miniature paintings depicting the life of Christ, the Virgin Mary and saints, they were sometimes personalised for the patrons who commissioned them.

One of the rarest pieces in Suffolk House Antiques’ Christmas selling exhibition is a Georgian candle stand in fruitwood and elm. The back would have protected the flame so that the person using it would have uninterrupted light even in a draughty house. Examples bearing the original backs do not always show up intact.

The Bordoni and the Luini were not the only strong results achieved in the Drouot auction centre in the November sales.

The height of fashion nearly three centuries ago, this 18th century doll’s dress caught the eye at C&T’s (20% buyer’s premium) specialist sale in Tunbridge Wells.

The Château de Pontchartrain and the Phélypeaux family who lived there for almost two centuries was much in evidence as a provenance in the recent sales in Paris.

Less often seen than Suffragette propaganda and considerably less PC these days, a brass and enamel fob badge for the National League for Opposing Woman had its international admirers at Ipswich auction house Lockdales (19.5% buyer’s premium).

Possibly dating from the late 16th or early 17th century, a Spanish text manuscript version of Andrea Alciato’s 1531 'Emblemata', the first and most frequently reprinted emblem book, sold for $9000 (£7030) at Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in New York.

Two November sales underlined the current strength of the field of British studio pottery.

Specialist Philip Smith, head of the 20th Century & Modern British Art departments at the London outlet of Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s premium), believes studio ceramics should be classed as art.

Book dealer John Lawson joined EM Lawson & Co, the firm that his father had started at Sutton Coldfield in 1921, when he was demobbed from national service in the RAF in 1952.

Albert Moulton Foweraker’s (1873-1942) main interest as a watercolourist was the effect of blue moonlight on the landscape.