Oil painting

Fourteen unpublished paintings by Maurice Utrillo, the artist renowned for quintessential Paris street scenes, will be coming up for sale on November 23.

This little oil on canvas showing a seated lion watching the setting sun from the top of a rocky plateau is evocatively titled Les Deux Majestés and is a work by the 19th century Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904).

Standing proud in full riding wear, this early 20th century portrait of a female rider and her two terriers, below, struck a chord with bidders in Sussex.

The remote rocky islands of Orkney were a source of continued inspiration for the prolific Scottish painter Stanley Cursiter (1887-1976).

A painting by Herbert Arnould Olivier (1861-1952), a British artist and the uncle of the actor Lawrence Olivier, is among the stand-out works on show in Jeremy Green’s third gallery exhibition this year.

Pictures, trophies and other mementos were among the contents from a historic nursing home in south-west London dispersed at Ewbank’s (22.5% buyer’s premium).

A portrait of a young Stuart woman, below, attributed to the Hungarian painter Johannes Priwitzer (fl.1626-35), topped the picture section in a two-day sale at Cheffins (22.5% buyer’s premium) of Cambridge.

Gerard Sekoto (1913-93) is cementing his place as one of the most bankable names in the field of South African art.

Plenty to interest European buyers was available at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries (17% buyer’s premium) in Maine on August 25-26.

This small scene by Scottish genre painter Thomas Faed (1826-1900) shown below sold for a quadruple-estimate £8500 at Brightwells (22% buyer’s premium).

Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) of Leyburn claimed a new auction record for Bertram Priestman (1868-1951) when it sold a painting of an extensive river landscape by the local artist.

A very suitable buyer emerged for an 19th century picture of The Artists Rifles by John Evan Hodgson (1831-95) offered in Exeter.

A sweeping landscape by John Arnesby Brown (1866-1955) made a multi-estimate sum at Henry Adams (20% buyer’s premium), the second time in four months a work by the painter has done so at the Chichester firm.

The latest batch of period portraits to pass through Cheffins featured several from a late-16th century property in Great Chesterford, Essex. Passed by descent, the quartet was led by an attractive English School portrait of Queen Mary I (1516-58), an oil painted on an oval 2ft x 21in (62 x 53cm) canvas.

This portrait of Maria Luisa Maldonado, Marquesa de Torneros (1907) by the Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923) is a highlight of the next auction series at Ansorena to be held from July 17-19.

A quartet of oils by the contemporary British painter Sherree Valentine-Daines (b.1959) produced multi-estimate prices when they went under the hammer in Sussex.

Guided at £200-400, a pair of 17th century British school portraits (one pictured below) went on to fetch £1150 each at Halls (20% buyer’s premium) of Shrewsbury.

Pride comes before a fall and in the case of Napoleon, Smolensk came before Moscow. On May 18 Ketterer Kunst is selling a 2ft x 2ft 7in (60 x 79cm) scene of Napoleon observing the burning city of Smolensk.

The paintings of Welsh landscape artist Kyffin Williams (1918-2006) are much in evidence in this, the year of his centenary, and nowhere so much as in his native land.

LS Lowry’s industrial northern English city scenes, populated with his trademark ‘matchstick’ figures, have inspired many artists. Chief among them was Brian ‘Braaq’ Shields (1951-97), dubbed ‘Liverpool’s Lowry’.