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ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

The sales held by a variety of Monaco auction houses that are a feature of the summer season are traditionally big on jewellery, cars and Hermès handbags and other luxury accessories and modern art.

Alex Robins of Antique Fairs Cornwall (AFC Fairs) has run her biannual two-day antiques, vintage and decorative fairs at the Royal Cornwall Showground for nine years.

Large numbers of lots identified only as folders, boxes and albums full of prints, watercolours, maps and so on offered in a Brightwells (17.5% buyer’s premium) sale of July 5 included one disarmingly catalogued, in full, as ‘Sketches, Watercolours, Prints of Naked Ladies, chiefly’. It sold at £500.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

A round-up of art and antiques news from the previous seven days.

The BBC’s hit series Fake or Fortune? returns to our screens on Sunday August 20. ATG's Laura Chesters went behind the scenes for insight into the making of the show and to ask why the trade should tune in.

Southern softness and northern grit were both on display at Tennants (20% buyer’s premium) of Leyburn on July 15.

‘L’Abbé Quille’ (shown below), against whose leg a dog is seen relieving itself in the illustration, is one of 84 hand-coloured plates – 12 each of seven subjects – that make up a French magic trick book of c.1799 sold for £2900 by Dominic Winter (19.5% buyer’s premium) in a June 19-20 sale.

ATG’s weekly selection of items on sale at auctions and dealerships.

The final session of James D Julia’s three-day sale of more than 1600 lots to be held in Fairfield, Maine, from August 16-18 is devoted to Asian art.

Mark Law’s deal to buy auction firm Dreweatts and the Mallett brand from stamp dealer group Stanley Gibbons has collapsed.

Triple lens or Triunial magic lanterns were the iPhone 8 of their day. Since the days of the Sturm lantern in the 17th century, the technology had developed from basic projectors producing small, dimly lit images, to these magnificent machines capable of spectacular technicolour lantern entertainments.

A US judge has ordered Christie’s to identify the winning bidder of the $12.5m (£9.7m) Guennol Stargazer, an ancient Anatolian idol auctioned in New York in April.

As weapons of war, swords have an impressively long history, as demonstrated by recent auctions around the world. From two £11,000 Viking swords at Bonhams in London to General Patton’s 1945 presentation sabre at Hermann Historica (€54,000/£47,370), there were centuries of warfaring history on view, including blades from Japan, Korea and Greece.

Two American presentation swords, marking high points in two very different military careers, made their mark in recent sales.

Cased pairs of pistols remain a particular favourite with collectors, being relatively compact and often in excellent condition after centuries cocooned in their brass-bound mahogany boxes.

Back in the day, the most common overseas buyer at IACF Newark would have been American. However, a larger number now hails from the Far East, with visitors from Korea, Japan and Taiwan making up 30% of the overseas buyer numbers at the East Midlands event, according to IACF estimates.

ATG’s selection of auction lots bought by internet bidders on thesaleroom.com from the period July 13-19, 2017. This includes both the highest prices over estimate and the top prices paid online.