Sotheby's

On July 2 Sotheby’s will hold the first of a four-part series of sales to disperse an important collection of clocks and pocket watches.

Tribal art makes regular saleroom appearances in Paris, which is one of the major commercial centres in this sector.

Spring is a traditional point in the saleroom calendar for New York to mount its tribal art auctions.

Successfully bid to £80,000 among cartographic lots offered in London was a fine coloured copy of Ortelius’ Theatrum… of 1592.

A Qianlong (1736-95) three-colour lacquer throne provided the London series of Asian art sales with its headline moment.

Some eye-catching individual prices punctuated the latest Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art sales in New York, helping to lift the year-on-year total .

One of the few images of a 16th century Eastern potentate by a Western artist emerged from a ‘royal collection’ to sell for a multi-estimate sum at Sotheby’s.

While Sotheby’s and Christie’s no longer hold regular dedicated auctions of European ceramics, they still cater for elements of this market in their main centres worldwide via series of mixed-discipline traditional decorative arts auctions.

This framed wood panel decorated in gold, silver and red lacquer with a pair of spiny lobsters on a rocky outcrop is signed 'Gyoen Hachijuni O Koma Zeshin' (An old man in his 82nd year, Kona Zeshin) and dated 1888.

Offered as a part of the natural history section of a May 14 book sale at Sotheby’s (25/20/13.9% buyer’s premium) is an extremely rare photobook on New Zealand ferns by Herbert Boucher Dobbie issued c.1880 – no copy of which, it seems, has previously been seen at auction.

Bid to £19,700 in a recent sale was one of 100 signed, large paper firsts of Oscar Wilde’s 'The Importance of Being Earnest' published by Leonard Smithers in 1899.