Auctions

On account of its relative scarcity, all Irish silver carries a premium. It is the pieces made in small provincial centres that are most highly prized.

As a rule, Lempertz (24/20% buyer’s premium) in Cologne always opens its spring season with a sale of moderately priced Old Master and 19th century paintings.

This highly elaborate chest of drawers decorated in boulle marquetry technique with a variety of different figural and foliate motifs featured in the furniture session of a sale at Hampel (29.5% buyer’s premium) in Munich on March 28.

Offered as a sale within a sale, 34 silver snuff boxes and vinaigrettes came fresh to market at Lawrences’ April 9 sale after decades in a private collection.

The extensive spring sale at Schuler (20/18.6/16.6% buyer’s premium) in Zurich lasted from March 18-22. The results were as varied as the works of art on offer.

After almost 50 years on public display in the silver galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a James I silver shell-form spice or sugar box was offered for sale at Salisbury saleroom Woolley & Wallis.

The biggest surprise at the sale of works of art at Koller (25/22/15% buyer’s premium) in Zurich on March 28 was the result for a bronze figure by Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815-91).

Guide to the prostitutes and brothels of London tempts bidders at Staffordshire sale.

Tightly bound, clean and crisp, and “about the nicest copy we have seen” was the assessment by a specialist US saleroom of the biggest winner in its auction of a single-owner gambling memorabilia collection.

Researching Old Master paintings is sometimes likened to putting together the pieces of a jigsaw. But for one upcoming work, it seems this was quite literally the case.

A drawing offered at a Paris auction with an attribution to Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Francesco Penni (1488-1528) was hammered down at €1.13m (£980,000).

A large oil on panel map by MacDonald Gill celebrating the presence of stationer WH Smith on the British high street in the 1920s was hammered down at £50,000 in Gloucestershire.