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The plethora of single-collection sales at the start of the year was not at the expense of old-fashioned auctions offering good-quality offerings across the range of dealing and collecting – such as the Winter Fine Arts sale at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) of Dorchester.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from March 5-16, 2019.

Old Master art dealer Mark Weiss began exhibiting at TEFAF Maastricht in 1988. But for all the important 16th and 17th century portraits Weiss has sold at the Dutch fair since then, few are likely to have made a local connection quite like his gallery’s star object for 2019.

Paris is a centre for auctions of Pre-Columbian art. On March 18 Copages is offering an Italian collection of works that were sourced from major salerooms such as Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Loudmer as well as specialist dealers like Galerie Mermoz and the Emmeritz Gallery.

MADAM – We can always count on Gavin Littaur to fill your letters page with a hefty dose of common sense (ATG No 2381). But I fear his dispute with Defra will come to nothing if my present spat with HMRC is anything to go by.

The sale at Bearnes Hampton & Littlewood (plus 21% buyer’s premium) on January 29 – an event dominated by the multi-estimate performance of a Qianlong mark vase in the Ming taste sold at £460,000 (see ATG No 2378) – also included a hardwood (probably olivewood), bone and mother-of-pearl inlaid model of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

What seems to have been an overdue clear-out at Monmouth Trading Standards department led to half a dozen lots of imperial weights and measures being consigned to Stroud Auctions (18% buyer’s premium).

A small group of lots in a recent Edinburgh sale were once part of the library of the late 5th Earl of Lovelace at Torridon House.

Art dealers and auction house experts were struck from all TEFAF vetting panels following the introduction of a new global policy last year.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Helped by conservatively pitched estimates, a clutch of middle-market Orientalist pictures achieved some modest growth in value on their first return to auction in three decades.

A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening… is the single volume that I have selected from a recent Gloucestershire auction in which job lots were very much in evidence and that acted as a sort of extra, clearing-the-decks sort of exercise in the saleroom’s calendar.

William Wyllie’s 1917 watercolour HMS New Zealand – The Sixteen Point Turn at Jutland was among the stand-out sales at the inaugural Connect Art Fair where it was offered for a price in the region of £20,000.

MADAM – In so many respects, anyone reading or watching the news over the last 12 months could quite easily believe that the whole world has gone mad.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period February 21-27, 2019. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

Precisely four months on from a flood inundating its saleroom, Carmarthen auction house Peter Francis (20% buyer’s premium) enjoyed a literal and metaphorical day in the sunshine on February 13.

This study (below) was one of 10 drawings by Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98) consigned by an unidentified charitable trust to Bonhams’ 19th Century European, Victorian and British Impressionist Art sale on February 20.

Three modestly valued works selling at regional sales below £800, including an 18th century oil on canvas

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Vintage photographic equipment will be up for grabs at the Ivoire Chartres auction firm on March 9-10.