London

Some of the heat may have left the Jack Vettriano (b.1951) market since his Singing Butler made £660,000 in April 2004, but Sotheby’s nevertheless posted the second highest price ever paid for the artist at auction when they sold Bluebird at Bonneville for £400,000 (plus premium) – the top lot of the firm’s annual sale at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire on the evening of August 29.

ELTHAM Palace in Greenwich is fully booked on Sunday, September 9 for its regular biannual Art Deco Fair with 15 specialist Deco dealers, including the Design Gallery of Westerham.

A substantial reward is being offered for the return of a George III ormolu and white marble table clock by Matthew Boulton stolen from Knightsbridge dealership Hotspur on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 22.

The Frieze art fair (October 11-14) at Regents Park has already spawned two ‘tailgate’ events in the form of Scope and Zoo, but this year’s new addition is a little different.

THE antiques and collectors fairs at Alexandra Palace will not be returning following a breaking off in negotiations between the organisers and the venue’s new owners.

Bonhams have announced a major strengthening and enlargement of the ceramics department at their New Bond Street rooms with the immediate appointment of two former Sotheby’s specialists.

LONDON has gained ground in the global art market during 2007 with over $2.35bn in sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s for the first six months of the year. In their US rooms the two leading auctioneers took $2.6bn over the same period.

Soon after marrying his young wife Jane, William Morris commissioned his friend Philip Webb to build them a house. The end result, completed in 1859, was Red House, named after its steep red-tiled roof.

PHILLIPS de Pury look to have taken another step to increase their influence as a major player in London’s contemporary art market by forming a new partnership with The Saatchi Gallery.

TRACEY Emin, who recently launched a scathing attack on Tower Hamlets Council after it granted a licence for a controversial three-month “city beach bar” in a car park yards from her Spitalfields home, is a regular visitor to Spitalfields Antiques Market, most recently looking for a tiara to wear to charity balls.

MARKS, one of London’s best-known silver dealerships, are to refocus their operations, moving out of costly showrooms in Mayfair’s Mount Street.

FOR the third time this year, a dealers’ survey has highlighted the unpopularity of the Artist’s Resale Right in the trade and the indifference of a majority artists to the ruling.

One of the quirkier and more unusual offerings to feature in Christie’s £3.7m sale of English furniture and works of art on June 7 was this rare Elizabethan map fragment, one of the first tapestries ever produced in England.

In the 1950s, a farmer in Ingatestone, Essex found a tiny silver tag measuring just 3/4in (1.8cm) long on his farm. Shaped like a shield with a ring, one side was engraved LORD RICH above a stylised bird and the other featured a family crest.

THIS year's Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair, held from June 14 to 20, was thought by many to have the highest quality stock seen at the event for some time.

THIRTY-six stallholders from Portobello Road made their way to Madrid at the end of June where the London street market was recreated for a day in the Spanish capital.

It’s doubtful that the average person associates car boot sales with burlesque dancers, but that’s the combination you’ll find at the Art Car Boot Fair 2007 in London’s Brick Lane.

On June 12, John Still, a private collector from Edinburgh, walked along a deserted Bond Street to arrive at the doors of the Fine Art Society at 6am, just a minute ahead of a second enthusiastic collector.

THE market for early English portrait miniatures received a sizeable fillip in London last week. The auction record was broken twice within the space of 24 hours with the sale of two iconic images of major figures in British history and this was backed up by a crop of other strong prices for top flight examples from the 16th and 17th centuries.

A futuristic helicopter, an armchair you can’t get out of, vibrating disco shoes, a collapsible bicycle wheel and a jacket that reduces jet lag.