Auctions

An important private collection of Beatrix Potter books, manuscripts, artwork, photographs, figurines and collectables is being offered for sale at Bloomsbury Auctions on February 27.

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

A 19th/early 20th century totem pole brightly painted and carved with a beaver, a bear, a whale and a surmounted eagle with outspread wings is to go under the hammer at Duke’s of Dorchester in Dorset on February 14.

The latest sales of Impressionist and Modern art in London posted a strong overall performance as private buyers showed a growing appetite for works by major names.

This Arts and Crafts music cabinet, entered into a recent sale at Robertson’s of Kinbuck, near Dunblane, without reserve, turned out to be a hitherto lost design by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

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).

Results from the first timed auction on the-saleroom.com, hosted last month for McTear’s of Glasgow, indicate that this style of selling has a useful role to play alongside established live auctions of fine art and antiques.

In 1881, at around the time of his 18th birthday, the orphan and Eton College schoolboy John Edmund Hugh Balfour went on a major spending spree.

The handwritten draft of one of John Betjeman’s best-known poems, ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’, is just one of the gems in the next tranche of the Roy Davids Collection to appear at Bonhams Bond Street.

A group of hitherto unknown 19th century documents has come to light revealing illegal trafficking of Chinese people to Latin America where they were forced into slavery.

Medals and other material relating to George William Hutson, a British athlete who served in the First World War, will be offered for sale at Peacocks on February 1 in Bedford.

Frank Marshall’s two-day sale on January 29-30 in Knutsford, Cheshire, will include this painting by Laslett John Pott (1837-1898).

Andrew Smith & Son’s January 29 sale in Winchester includes this winter landscape by Frederick Marinus Kruseman (1816-82).

A rare American coin from a schoolboy’s coin collection was knocked down at auction for £185,000 at Salisbury saleroom Woolley & Wallis this week.

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.

Nestled among a 173-lot ‘time capsule’ collection from a Staffordshire estate offered at Hanson’s on January 12, the Old Master picture shown here proved to be the star performer of the sale by some considerable margin.

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

This 19th century ceramic plaque painted with two duellists in sepia forms part of the collection of the late Bernard Popland, a former championship fencer.

Consigned to Special Auction Services on the back of the £76,000 Märklin ‘first series’ tinplate toy HMS Terrible they sold from the Ron McCrindell collection in April 2012, this Märklin tinplate battleship Sachsen will be offered in Greenham, near Newbury, on January 31.

Created by the 20th century Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, this Paimio seat, with a model no. of 41, is to be included in Sworders’ Decorative Art Sale on January 29 in Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex.