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A selection of eight top items sold at regional salerooms who reported hammer totals for ATG's annual round-up of the auction market for 2018.

Much of the pre-sale interest in the 19th century paintings offered at the major London rooms centred on two landscapes by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) at Sotheby’s (25/20/12.9% buyer’s premium).

A work once said to have “…set the course for the modern world by its effective destruction of the anthropocentric view of the universe” made a rare auction appearance.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Back by popular demand, says Caroline Brown of Rose & Brown Vintage, is her biannual Vintage Furniture and Home Fair held in the Old Woollen Room at the atmospheric Sunny Bank Mills, a former textiles mill in Farsley near Leeds.

Sellers should be wary about Private Treaty Sales where the exact result is hidden

Historically the first major sale of the year, the January ‘furniture’ auction at Woolley & Wallis (25% buyer’s premium) turns eyes towards Salisbury for evidence of what the next 12 months will bring.

Greenslade Taylor Hunt’s (19.5% buyer’s premium) first sale of the year got off to a bright start with a Singaporean painting sailing to £19,000.

'Across the Continent. Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way' is a well-known hand coloured litho print issued by Currier & Ives, although the publisher’s imprint has been cut off the bottom of the example shown below.

Our weekly selection from salerooms and dealerships.

Ephemera, photos and, remarkably, a penguin egg relating to Captain Robert Scott’s ill-fated 'Terra Nova' Expedition to the Antarctic in 1910 were eagerly contested in the room, on the phone and online at Stroud Auction Rooms’ latest sale.

Dated c.1930, this Lenci figure of a girl in fashionable culottes, below, was estimated at £200-300 at Adam Partridge (20% buyer’s premium) but appears to have been spotted as one of the rarer products of the Turin factory.

Three modestly valued works sold in regional sales.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period January 8-16, 2019. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.

The traditionally ‘dead’ period between Christmas and New Year was enlivened by the December 28 sale at Wotton Auction Rooms (17.5% buyer’s premium) in Gloucestershire – to the extent that more than 20,000 people suffering withdrawal symptoms worldwide viewed it online and 1360 of them registered to bid.

Building a collection can be the work of a lifetime. Selling is often a much quicker affair. But dealer Haydn Hansell of Juno Antiques is being far from hasty when it comes to the fine assortment of mostly 18th century porcelain he offers this year.

The owner of an 18th century double-manual harpsichord, the only one of its type known to exist, has been temporarily prevented from exporting it in the hope a UK buyer can be found.

The continued interest in Victorian music boxes in this age of Spotify and streaming was evident when three were among the 1500-lot sale held by Unique Auctions (17.5% buyer’s premium) to launch the new year.

In the first of a new occasional series of collector interviews ATG talks to barrister, author and illustrator, Frank Hinks QC.

Sensual, satirical and grotesque: the works of Beresford Egan (1905-84) certainly fit a description of ‘distinctive’.