Front Page and News

Researching Old Master paintings is sometimes likened to putting together the pieces of a jigsaw. But for one upcoming work, it seems this was quite literally the case.

Dealer Andrew Sim has sold 14 Second World War pictures by Polish-born artist Feliks Topolski (1907-89) to the Imperial War Museum.

A drawing offered at a Paris auction with an attribution to Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Francesco Penni (1488-1528) was hammered down at €1.13m (£980,000).

Estimated at just £50-80, an Alice Davis Hitchcock medallion sold for £3000 (plus 20% buyer’s premium) at a Spink auction in London on April 10.

A very rare panorama of 17th century London depicting the city skyline in the wake of the Great Fire of 1666 has sold at auction for £90,000.

Duke’s of Dorchester has announced what promises to be the biggest house contents sale of the year and the largest by a UK regional auction house for more than a decade.

A fine pair of Regency dwarf bookcases in the manner of George Oakley sold for £58,000 at the Martel Maides saleroom in St Peter Port, Guernsey.

The May 11-12 Geneva sale conducted by Phillips in association with watch consultancy Bacs & Russo includes one of the most complicated wristwatches of the pre-war era: the Vacheron Constantin minute repeater with retrograde calendar from 1940.

Book dealer Roger Treglown is the new president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association.

The last panoramic painting by William Powell Frith (1819-1909) in private hands has been sold – but will not vanish from the public eye just yet.

Pioneer collection of street furniture goes from Parisian flat to the saleroom.

Sotheby’s spring Hong Kong auction series generated a grand total of HK$3.78bn (£367m) – the second highest in the company’s 46-year history in the territory – and a combined sell-through rate of 90%.

A Mannerist bronze after Giambologna and a rediscovered oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens posted seven-figure sums during the series of sales coinciding with the Salon du Dessin fair in Paris.

The global online art market recorded sales up 9.8% to $4.64bn (£3.5bn) in 2018, according to the seventh annual Hiscox Online Art Trade Report 2019.

The month of March produced an unusually large number of awakened sleepers across the UK’s regional auction rooms – from an Old Master drawing to a rare Marklin tinplate train.

A rifle from the personal armoury of Tipu Sultan sold for £60,000 in Oxfordshire last week.