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Salisbury saleroom Woolley & Wallis regained top spot in the UK regional auction market for 2018, while the investment at Chiswick Auctions has begun to bear fruit. These were just two of the findings in ATG's annual review of the hammer totals and trends at some of the leading salerooms in the UK and Ireland.

Estimated at just £150-200, a sardonyx cameo ring sold to a dealer for £39,000 (plus 20% buyer’s premium) at auction.

A single-owner collection, including significant works from the Modern British canon, sold for £541,200 at Sworders in Stansted Mountfitchet last week.

The European Parliament is to vote on a new law this week that would introduce extra red tape for dealers in antiques and antiquities operating within the European Union.

Henry Adams has achieved an auction record for Cedric Morris (1889-1982), completing a hat-trick of high prices for the artist-plantsman at the Chichester saleroom.

A selection of eight top items sold at regional salerooms who reported hammer totals for ATG's annual round-up of the auction market for 2018.

Much of the pre-sale interest in the 19th century paintings offered at the major London rooms centred on two landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.9% buyer’s premium).

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.

Sellers should be wary about Private Treaty Sales where the exact result is hidden

Historically the first major sale of the year, the January ‘furniture’ auction at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) turns eyes towards Salisbury for evidence of what the next 12 months will bring.

Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (19.5% buyer’s premium) first sale of the year got off to a bright start with a Singaporean painting sailing to £19,000.

'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.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Ephemera, photos and, remarkably, a penguin egg relating to Captain Robert Scott’s ill-fated 'Terra Nova' Expedition to the Antarctic in 1910 were eagerly contested in the room, on the phone and online at Stroud Auction Rooms’ latest sale.

Dated c.1930, this Lenci figure of a girl in fashionable culottes, below, was estimated at £200-300 at Adam Partridge (20% buyer’s premium) but appears to have been spotted as one of the rarer products of the Turin factory.