Auctioneers

US: THE object pictured here provided, literally and figuratively, the crowning glory of a highly successful $3.65m sale of Judaica at Sotheby’s New York on March 16.

UK: A GEORGE III shell-inlaid oval knife box and a 19th century oak and 7ft 6in (2.29m) high mahogany crossbanded longcase clock with a painted face signed Rogers, Dudley, each attracted a trade bid of £1600 to jointly lead this monthly catalogued sale of 504 lots in Hampshire.

UK: TOP LOT in this sale was a 1668 edition of Gervase Markham’s A Way to get Wealth, a ‘nonce’ collection, first issued in 1623, which incorporates half a dozen works by this important but prolific and commercially inventive writer on agriculture, who was not averse to putting different titles to what were essentially the same works or to re-issuing unsold copies of new books under new titles.

FRANCE: JEAN-BAPTISTE OUDRY brought early Spring smiles to Drouot as his Maison du Jardinier (1739) pictured here, first shown at the Salon of 1740, sold to a French buyer for a world record Fr6.2m (£639,000) under the Le Blanc hammer on March 17.

UK: FOR ‘British Decorative Arts’ read ‘British Decorative Ceramics’, or at least that is the way it looked at Christie's South Kensington (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) back on March 3. They dominated this event to the extent that they accounted for four-fifths of the 419-lot auction.

- Raymond Chandler on the English US: IN MY LAST American round-up, I reported on the sale at Swanns of an early printing of the Treaty of Paris that had been owned by the Reverend Samuel Cooper of Boston, a now largely forgotten but once key political and spiritual figure in the War of Independence.

UK: THE art trade generally classifies pictures as being either “commercial” or “academic” and it was generally the later term which best described the quality on offer at Phillips’ (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) March 19 sale of The Lloyd Collection of pictures in Oxford.

THE FUTURE shape of Phillips following the sudden retirement of former owner Christopher Weston became clearer last week.

SOTHEBY'S is to create a committee of non-executive directors, supported by independent lawyers, to hold a full internal review of the firm's code of conduct.

Sotheby’s chief executive Bill Ruprecht has also become chairman of the company with immediate effect following Michael I. Sovern’s decision to step down after 13 years.

Christie’s evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in London was led by Claude Monet's Iris Mauves as two telephone bidders battled it out over the £6m-9m estimate until the hammer fell at £9.6m.

Sotheby’s evening sale of Contemporary art in New York on November 13 achieved the highest total for any auction in the company’s history.