Auctions

Martel Maides of St Peter Port, Guernsey offered a single-strand pearl necklace for sale with a £1500-2000 estimate on the assumption they were natural saltwater pearls – the highest bidder reserving the right to send them for laboratory testing prior to settling the bill.

This postcard sketch by the Chapman Brothers is one of a large number created by well-known figures in art, sport, music TV and film to raise money for Action Against Cancer and the Brain Tumor Charity Silas Pullen Fund.

The Roman artist Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835) is best known as a prolific engraver, selling to tourists his prints portraying the everyday life and costumes of characters encountered in and around the Piazza della Rotonda.

Lyon & Turnbull are to sell the contents of Bantry House, County Cork, one of the best-known historic houses in the Republic of Ireland.

Seventeenth century Dublin trefid spoons are extremely scarce. Last year a single rat-tailed example by Andrew Gregory, 1685, sold for €9000 at Adams of Dublin.

Despite countless offers to leave France, Suzanne Belperron (1900-83) remained in German-occupied Paris throughout the Second World War – a jewellery maker and a Resistance fighter.

A draft of Bob Dylan’s seminal recording Like A Rolling Stone set a new auction record for a pop song manuscript when it sold for $1.7m (£1.04m) to an unnamed collector at Sotheby’s New York on June 24.

Consigned by the debt-ridden Delaware Museum of Art, Isabella and the Pot of Basil by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was the top lot of Christie’s sale of Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite and British Impressionist art in London last week.

Sotheby’s set a new auction record for a stamp with the $7.9m (£4.85m) hammer taken for the 1856 British Guiana one-cent Magenta in New York last week.

English cameo glass was the star of the show at Woody Auction’s second dispersal from the collection of Dr Ernest and Karin Rieger held in Wichita, Kansas.

Knocking others off their perch, Salisbury’s Woolley & Wallis improved upon their own auction record for Martin Brothers with the £75,000 sale of this bird jar to Gloucestershire British art pottery dealers AD Antiques.

The name Æthelberht and the title REX on an Anglo-Saxon penny just sold in London may provide a vital clue to a royal murder.

The year 1737 was something of an annus horribilis for George II.

The earliest dated picture by the 17th century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), one of only two works by the artist left in private hands, will be a highlight of Christie’s Old Masters auction in London next month.

When it comes to 20th century sporting pictures, there is no bigger name than Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959). Earlier this month, a sale at Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury sale saw the consignment of certainly one of the more notable works by the Mendham, Suffolk-born artist to have appeared in the regions over recent times.

“They think it’s all over... it is now!”

The most highly regarded piece of Chinese porcelain offered during the recent round of Asian sales was seen in Edinburgh where Lyon & Turnbull sold this blue and white dragon charger for £355,000.

A painting of a well-known location in Manchester by L.S. Lowry (1887-1976) led the latest sale of Modern & Post-War British Art at Sotheby’s.

Despite the unhelpful backdrop of Ukraine politics and the threat of economic sanctions, the Russian art market continued on its mercurial journey in the first week of June. The characteristic patchy selling rates for the ‘Londongrad’ sales were accompanied by moments of remarkable competition.

The First World War shattered not just lives but also perceptions of the ‘natural order’ of things across Europe and how it was ruled.