Sotheby's

The art market is “neither frothy nor depressed”, according to Sotheby’s chief executive Tad Smith.

For many years auctioneers have been itching to move the finest arms and armour from the province of the specialist collector and establish them with a wider audience as works of art in their own right.

Works by the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers continued to outperform the rest of the Victorian art market during the latest round of sales in London.

An extraordinarily rich and varied crop of book sales have taken place this summer.

A superb set of decorated armour sold at Sotheby’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) is believed to have set a record. The £880,000 hammer price for the three-quarter-length cuirassier protection is believed to be the highest auction result for 17th century armour.

A superb suite of the original ink and gouache drawings – one shown here – made by Carl Otto Czeschka to illustrate a 1908 edition of Die Niebelungen dem Deutschen Volke sold at $290,000 (£224,805) in a Sotheby’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) sale of June 6 called Important Design.

A record-breaking Canaletto (1697-1768) drawing was the toast of the capital’s Old Masters drawings sales.

Written off by some as a dying area, the latest Old Master series in London defied the naysayers with encouraging results during its traditional ‘grand finale’ slot at the end of the London sales season.

A number of the French auction rooms have released their sales figures for the first half of the year, with Christie’s Paris operation taking the top slot.

Like many of the world’s major art markets these days, Paris concentrates activity in the Asian art field into series at specific times of the year in an attempt to attract those all-important buyers from Mainland China.

For previous generations of artist jewellers, from René Lalique to Andrew Grima, retail sales and private commissions were everything. Typically it was only much later in the collecting lifecycle, after a period of posthumous reassessment and rediscovery, that their work appeared at auction with any great regularity.

Stealing all the headlines at Sotheby’s (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) Fine Jewels sale in London on June 7 was the £540,000, 26ct ’tenner’ diamond, bought by the vendor at a boot fair in the 1980s. However, among the 370 lots were items with more illustrious provenances.