Oil painting

Outside Paris auctions have also started up as lockdown eases.

Sotheby’s Paris (25/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) reported a cumulative total of €5.4m for the five online sales it held over two weeks in mid May through to early June. The initiative attracted new buyers, said the auction house, with 35% in the jewellery sale and 27% in the Contemporary art auction.

Shortly before the UK lockdown, Cumbrian saleroom Thomson Roddick (17.5% buyer’s premium inc VAT) offered works from the collection of The Shorthorn Society, a body that promotes the famous breed of cattle in the UK and Ireland.

A portrait of a 16th century Protestant theologian and reformer surfaced at a sale at Ginhart (23% buyer’s premium) in Tegernsee, some 35 miles south of the Bavarian capital Munich.

Painting went through lengthy ownership saga before being returned to family and then sold.

Sir Oswald Birley (1880-1952) is among the artists most represented in UK public collections. Art UK records 173 works in national museums and institutions, National Trust properties and local museums.

MADAM – Because I am so old my hen-pecking children have had me in lockdown since the beginning of March.

'Portrait of a Young Girl with a Cigarette' was a high-flyer in a sale at Wendl (21% buyer’s premium) in Rudolstadt held before open auctions were prohibited by the German authorities.

Giant of the Welsh art market takes the limelight with an intriguing yellow-infused work

An early work by Boris Anisfeld titled 'Adam and Eve' made one of the highest prices in the Russian paintings and works of art auction at Shapiro (25% buyer’s premium) in New York

Artist battles back to regain favour with auctioneers, private buyers and dealers

An early coastal scene of Australia sold for more than five times its top estimate to an online buyer from New South Wales at Ewbank’s anniversary sale.

The Limerick-born painter Norman Garstin (1847-1926) was an engineer, architect, and a diamond prospector before he settled on art as a career.

Painting of Evening Star reflects end of an era as coal-fired locomotives started to hit the buffers.

Irish painter William Conor (1881-1968) received many official commissions during a prolific artistic career, including from King George V, but it was his warm and sympathetic portrayals of working-class life in Ulster that are best known today.

Two alluring early-20th century British school portraits of attractive young women caught the eye in recent regional sales. Both modestly estimated, they brought similar four-figure sums.

This portrait study is by Sybil Atteck (1911-75), a pioneering artist in Trinidad and Tobago of Chinese descent known for her work in watercolour.

The big result in Doyle's (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) latest Old Master Paintings and Drawings sale in New York was the portrait of Pauline Bonaparte Napoleon’s sister by Marie-Victoire Lemoine pictured in ATG No 2429 that sold for $310,000 (£238,700), an auction high for the artist.

The artist Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy (1853-1924), known as ‘Géo’, was a member of the French Naturalist movement and was best known for his paintings of Parisian children and daily urban life.

Included in a recent sale of American and European paintings and works of art sale at Skinner (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) in Boston was this 7¼x 12¾in (19 x 32.5cm) oil on copper painting, 'The Dispute'.