Sotheby's

Sotheby’s are to sell the stock of Bourdon House, the historic Georgian townhouse in Mayfair recently sold by London dealers Mallett.

While many are still finding the market sluggish for standard English brown furniture, there is no shortage of demand at the top end as shown by results from the latest sales in London.

Sotheby’s have revised employee incentive packages in a move that should help stabilise costs and prevent key staff from being poached by rivals.

Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art sale of 83 lots on November 7 generated $238m (£131.5m) and was the auctioneers’ highest auction total since the previous Impressionist and Modern high water mark of May 1990.

IT was the Gothic furniture that was in strongest demand at Sotheby’s Haute Epoque sale in Bond Street last week, none more so than this massive 16th/17th oak refectory table that was bid to an astonishing £420,000 (plus premium).

Jackson Pollock’s 1948 drip painting Number 5 has set a new record for a painting. Mexican financier David Martinez has reportedly paid $140m for it in a private deal brokered by Sotheby’s.

WHEN TEFAF Maastricht opens its doors next March, something will be different. An extraordinary sequence of events means that for the first time, the world’s two biggest auctioneers will effectively stand as exhibitors at the world’s most important fair for specialist dealers in fine art and antiques.

AMERICAN folk art moved into new territory at Sotheby’s New York on October 6 when this life-size Indian chief weathervane with a rich verdigris patina sold for $5.2m/£2.9m (plus 20/12% buyer’s premium).

£57m Indian summer for auction rooms

Renowned Bristol-born graffiti artist Robert Banks, better known as Banksy (b.1975), has made himself into a globally-recognised phenomenon by planting his subversive guerrilla artwork in the world’s best galleries, museums, and amusement parks.

When Sotheby’s sold the first portion of the Wardington library of atlases and geographies last year, London dealer Bernard Shapero set a cartographic auction record by paying £1.3m for the ‘Doria’ atlas, a superb collection of so-called Lafreri School maps of the latter part of the 16th century.

Sotheby’s New York was closed in the afternoon of October 11 in the wake of the plane crash that killed the two people onboard, injured 21 and briefly raised fears of another terrorist attack on the city.

In 1862, the English missionary Father William Duncan brought around 70 Tsimshian Christian converts to an abandoned Native village and established a model Church of England mission settlement at Metlakatla in Northern British Columbia.

Sotheby’s Café is celebrating its tenth birthday with the publication of a cookbook for the cultured.

Higher charges and a more sophisticated system of auction guarantees have helped Sotheby’s reap record profits for the second quarter of 2006, doubling profits for the first half of the year compared to 2005.

IT set a British auction record for a Shakespeare First Folio and made the highest price ever seen for a printed book at Sotheby’s London (20/12% buyer’s premium) – but hushed voices at the back of the saleroom were suggesting that the £2.5m hammer price represented pretty good value for a near-perfect copy of the most important book in English literature.

IN what must be one of the least surprising private treaty sales negotiated, The Martin Luther King Jr Collection will go to Morehouse College, Dr King's alma mater in his home city of Atlanta.

More suited to the wall than the bed and more a piece of social history than a functional textile, this 19th century appliqué felt coverlet reaped the rewards when it sold for £24,000 (plus premium) at Kerry Taylor auctions in association with Sotheby's on June 26.

Record turnover at London flagship sales but the buzz of the 1980s has gone

Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton was one of the most notorious British commanders of the American Revolution. After leading a series of successful operations in both the north and south, he returned home after the war as one of the most famous men in England, sat for a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and began a long-term affair with actress and royal consort Mary Robinson.