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THIS most unusual looking beast is expected to be the star lot at a sale to be held in Paris on July 4 at a most unusual location, the pagoda-like Maison Chinoise, rue de Courcelles, Paris 8.

Back on April 9 and 10 Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) Bond Street rooms offered a double helping of portrait miniatures on consecutive days: a 165-lot single owner and a 133-lot mixed-vendor sale, both of which saw around three-quarters of their contents get away.

On the same day that Christie’s King Street rooms were offering pieces from the upper-crust end of the portrait miniatures and vertu market, their South Kensington (17/510% buyer’s premium) rooms had a more bread-and-butter selection of the same material.

A new auction record for any antiquity was set at Christie’s last week on June 13 when the 5ft 3in (1.6m) high ancient Roman marble statue of Venus, pictured right, sold for £7.2m.

AT the time it was produced – 1930/31 – the geometric design of a Shelley tea set with triangular handles was far from popular and speedily withdrawn. Seven decades on, with Art Deco a buoyant area and Shelley becoming more in demand by collectors, the scarcity of the pattern was a considerable addition to the appeal of a tea set for six offered at Stride’s 1000-lot West Sussex sale.

WITH little in the way of furniture at this 1000-lot Essex sale at Ambrose on 17-18 May it was left to jewellery to provide the higher prices and collectors’ items to provide the wider interest.

Predating Shackleton’s famous experiments in polar printing by nearly 60 years, this is one of a group of six playbills printed in the Arctic in 1851-52, during the voyages of the Resolute and Intrepid in search of Sir John Franklin.