International

The latest TEFAF market report values the global art market at €43 billion for the last year. The figure was 7% down the previous year, but the fall is wholly explained by a €3.5bn decline in sales in China.

Fine art, antiques and collectables worth £8m, consigned from the UK by a consortium of regional auctioneers, are currently on a container ship heading to China.

Showing up at TEFAF Maastricht in the southern Netherlands with a stand cobbled together from stale, lacklustre stock is tantamount to professional suicide, the sort of nightmare that has dealers waking up in a cold sweat.

At the end of the Second World War, this 18th century flintlock repeating carbine was thrown onto a huge heap of weapons confiscated from German citizens.

Scam guides have reared their head again, targeting dealers in a bid to extort large sums of money for useless advertising.

New York’s highest court has decided to review a recent ruling that says salerooms in the state must reveal consignors’ names to buyers.

It’s usually the stuff of fairy tales, but a collection of $20 gold coins and medals valued at around $1m for sale at Bonhams in Los Angeles in June is real enough.

After 45 years, Sotheby’s are to cease holding auctions in Canada to focus instead on private sales and sourcing material for the international market.

Paris auction house Piasa are making a bold leap across the Seine and opening a new saleroom on the rue du Bac, thereby becoming the first Parisian auctioneers to hold sales on the Left Bank.

The Modern and Contemporary art collection accumulated over a 60-year period by singer Andy Williams will be sold at auction later this year.

Students of American ceramic history have long been taught that the first successful producers of porcelain in North America were Gousse Bonnin (1741-c.1780) and George Anthony Morris (1741/5-73), who ran the short-lived American China Manufactory in Philadelphia between 1769 and 1772.

Stack’s Bowers Galleries of Irvine, California, have set a new global auction record for a coin at a hammer price of $8.525m (£5.61m).

Dolphin Promotions have sold the long-running ‘Miami National Antiques Show & Sale’ to US Antique Shows, a division of consumer and tradeshow producers GLM.

Dallas-based Heritage Auctions say 2012 was their best year to date, with total sales of more than $860m.

An Old Master by the 17th century French painter Charles le Brun has been discovered hanging unattributed in the Hôtel Ritz in Paris.

Sotheby’s Institute of Art are to partner Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles to offer a new Master’s degree in Art Business.

The Association of Accredited Auctioneers (Triple-A), founded in 2012 by 19 UK auctioneers to attract Chinese buyers, are to hold an auction of Western fine art and antiques in China.

After a tough economic year, several French auction firms have now released their sales figures for 2012.

A rare Holtzapffel & Company rose engine lathe turned a few heads at Skinner’s recent Science, Technology and Clocks sale to take $190,000 (£124,185) as the top lot of the day.

Auction Team Breker in Cologne have sold a technical rarity of the highest order – one of the six known working models of the first computer ever made by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the founders of Apple.