Sotheby's

THE competition over private treaty sales headlines Sotheby’s and Christie’s latest set of results which cover the first half of 2011.

Making a record price for any Venetian view painting at auction, Francesco Guardi's (1712-1793) monumental View of the Rialto Bridge, Looking North, from the Fondamenta del Carbon sold for £23.8m hammer at Sotheby's Old Master evening sale on July 7.

A PICTURE purchased at Sotheby’s Chatsworth ‘Attic’ sale last year has become the centre of an attribution debate after being re-ascribed to Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) by a leading London dealership.

BILLED as “the greatest collection of Modern British Art ever to come to the market”, the sale of the Evill-Frost collection at Sotheby’s in London did not disappoint.

PAINTINGS may have provided the large bulk of the money raised in last week’s Russian sales, but the auctions also provided the usual glut of works of art, Fabergé and icons.

THE man who oversaw the French Revolution's 'reign of terror' but who finally met his end at the guillotine himself, Maximilien de Robespierre, was back on the block again at the end of last month as Sotheby's auctioned an extraordinary cache of documents in Paris.

SOTHEBY’S made a profit in the first three months of 2011 – that profit may have been only $2.4m, but it compares with a loss of $2.2m for the same period last year.

THE latest sales of Contemporary art in New York produced some solid results, but buyers were selective and not all the projected highlights fulfilled vendors’ expectations.

IN a series of high-profile auctions in New York that saw an underperforming run of Impressionist and Modern art sales, the eye-catching price of the week by some distance came for a 19th century historical genre painting.

SOTHEBY'S will sell the earliest rules of club football on July 14. They are part of a lot which includes the historic archive of the world’s oldest football club, Sheffield FC.

SOTHEBY’S latest Asian series represented an all-time high for the firm in Hong Kong.

ON April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin blasted out of the earth’s atmosphere in the Vostok 3KA-3 Space Capsule, becoming the first man to travel into space.

CONSOLIDATED annual sales at Sotheby’s were up 74% to £3.17bn ($4.8bn), including buyer’s premium, putting the firm marginally behind Christie’s, who posted results of £3.3bn ($5bn) last month.

ALBRECHT Dürer may not be the name most people would think of as producing the earliest printed star charts, but his will be the name that counts when Sotheby's offer a very rare pair of charts in a March 30 print sale.

LONDON’S latest series of Contemporary art sales put in a robust performance. Auctioneers posted high selling rates and saw the greatest depth of bidding since the art market downturn two years ago.

AN original Monopoly set offered as part of the toy collection of publisher Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990) and his sons made $120,000 (plus premium) at a recent auction at Sotheby's New York.

WORKS by some of biggest names in the Modern and Contemporary art market drew serious levels of international competition in London last week.

SOTHEBY'S have announced that they are to make Paris their European centre for sales of 20th century decorative art and design and photographs.

THROUGHOUT this month, Sotheby’s New York are devoting an entire floor of their York Avenue headquarters to what they call “the largest and most comprehensive collection of magnificent quality European and American toys and trains ever assembled”.

DEMAND for fine wines showed no sign of abating at the latest round of auctions in Hong Kong.