International

A well-established lynchpin of the Paris rentrée is the gallery-based, Left Bank tribal art fair known as the 'Parcours des Mondes' (PDM) staged in the small galleries that pepper the network of streets in the 6th arrondisement antiques district around Saint Germain des Prés.

All auctions are the same aren’t they? Well not exactly.

Sotheby’s has upped the ante in the digital auction space by scrapping buyer’s premium for online-only sales.

The Chinese auction market is attempting to tackle non-payments with a series of initiatives debated at the Chinese Antiques and Artwork Auction International Forum last week.

The second, and final, instalment of the collection of the Viennese art dealer Reinhold Hofstatter will come up for sale at Dorotheum’s Vienna rooms on September 26.

More than 100 lots of robots and space toys feature in Morphy Auctions’ 1700-lot toy and doll sale to be held on September 16-17 in Denver, Pennsylvania.

A Song dynasty brush washer, one of the few examples of Ru guanyao court ware still in private hands, will be offered by Sotheby’s Hong Kong with an estimate in excess of HK$100m on October 3.

Dealers and auctioneers are again being targeted by scam guides that seek to extort large sums of money in return for inclusion in worthless trade listings.

Music, in printed editions rather than autograph scores, played a significant part in raising a premium-inclusive €1.65m (£1.45m) for the third portion of the Pierre Bergé library to come to auction.

After a summer break, the next auction session at Duran Subastas in Madrid on September 21 will feature a special section of 33 lots of Ethiopian art, including intricately decorated wooden crucifixes, bibles, paintings and thrones, all coming to auction from a private collection.

It’s late August and the art market continues its summer slumber.

Large-scale paintings of intimate domestic scenes are unusual in Chinese art. The Chinese export reverse-painted glass painting of a young mother nursing her infant son offered at Northeast Auctions in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, earlier this month is thought to be one of only a handful of full-size versions painted of this once popular image.

It may be pretty quiet on the auction front in Europe but Down Under the saleroom and fairs scene is in full swing.