Sotheby's

AT Sotheby's sale in New Bond Street on December 7, a copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America set a new auction record for any printed book when it sold to the London art dealer Michael Tollemache for £6.5m (plus premium).

SOTHEBY’S set a new auction record for a jewel in Geneva when a 24.78-carat fancy intense pink diamond sold to London jeweller Laurence Graff at SFr40.5m (£25.6m) plus premium.

IT measures over 11ft (3.4m) wide and stands 11ft 6in (3.5m) high, was built in Melbourne and is carved over the entire surface with figure and details emblematic of the foundation and history of the state of Victoria.

INCREASING revenues at Sotheby’s have given a further indication of the recovering art market. The company’s latest set of results shows a major turnaround for the first nine months of 2010, going from a loss of around $80m for the equivalent period in 2009 to a profit of $64.7m.

ALONGSIDE the $65.5m (£42.8m) Modigliani (see story here), the price of the week in New York was the phenomenal $32m (£20.9m) seen for The Finding of Moses by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

RECORD prices for three European artists helped lift the latest round of Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York. With the market much more selective since the downturn two years ago and most of the competition focusing on the biggest trophy lots, the new saleroom highs for Henri Matisse, Juan Gris and Amedeo Modigliani provided further evidence of recovery at the top end.

AT £5.26m hammer, Sotheby’s three-day dispersal from the attics, stables and stores of the Derbyshire seat of the Dukes of Devonshire, was the ultimate in a ‘dusting down’ sale.

THE world auction record for a Chinese ceramic of work of art toppled during Sotheby's latest week-long Asian sales series of classical, modern and contemporary Chinese art, watches, wine and jewellery in Hong Kong.

SUCH was the media coverage, and the worldwide interest, within the first three hours Sotheby's sale of the contents from the attics at Chatsworth had outstripped their modest £2.5m estimate for the entire three days.

SOTHEBY’S have launched a retail and online wine business based in New York.

LA Minotauromachie from 1935 is arguably the masterpiece of the Pablo Picasso's 2000 or so different printed works.

WITH the new auction season getting underway, the London houses have been rushing to announce their star lots as the treasures from aristocratic collections continue to emerge in the saleroom.

IT looks like a flying saucer, and to those viewing it on the monastery wall in Verona where it had hung since the Middle Ages, it can have had hardly less of an impact.

CHRISTIE’S have announced worldwide sales of £1.7bn ($2.57m) for the first half of 2010 – 46 per cent up on the same period for 2009.

Among a series of records for British watercolours posted during Sotheby's sale entitled An Exceptional Eye: A Private British Collection on July 14, the most spectacular price was the £2.1m bid for this striking view of the Lake of Albano and Castel Gandolfo by John Robert Cozens (1752-1797).

A DEBT-plagued university in Boston has entered into an agreement with Sotheby’s to lease rather than sell off works from its museum’s $350m art collection.

JUST one week after Christie’s held their series of London sales from the cellars, storehouses and attics of Althorp, ancestral home of the Spencer family, Sotheby’s announced that they are to hold an autumn auction of attic treasures from Chatsworth, the Derbyshire home of the Dukes of Devonshire.

AT 11 1/2 stone and 4ft 3in (1.3m) wide, it is big enough to bathe in. Baron Raby’s wine cistern was ordered from the workshops of goldsmith Philip Rollos in 1705 as part of his ambassadorial plate in his capacity as Ambassador Extraordinary to the King of Prussia in Berlin.

HAD it not been for the headline-grabbing and record-breaking J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851), the latest Old Master auctions in London would have seemed a bit flat.

THE latest Contemporary art sales in London were a little flatter than expected, but Modern British art generated a batch of stand-out prices.