West Midlands

This oil on canvas of A June Day, Ludlow by Beryl Maud Sinclair (1901-67) is among the works featured at Miles Wynn Cato’s final exhibition devoted to views of the Shropshire market town.

This Meiji period (1868-1912) bronze of a comical seated monkey, holding an inro and netsuke that he inspects by lifting a pair of spectacles was a recent valuation day find for Fieldings of Stourbridge.

Halls’ Country House & Asian Art sale in Shrewsbury on May 15 will include a 21in (54cm) Kangxi famille verte vase decorated with a panorama of Asiatic birds, butterflies and dragonflies.

Two upcoming annual specialist fairs both running on Sunday, May 12.

An Elkington electroplated duck press outsold silver proper at Halls (20% buyer’s premium) of Shrewsbury on March 20.

In 'The Countryside Through Art', mid-century specialist Fifties Art & Design offers three views of a nearby landmark by John Piper (1903-92).

Detailed down to pneumatic tyres, knock-off hub caps and rack-and-pinion steering, the clockwork toy of Alfa Romeo’s P2, the world-beating racing car between 1924-30, was produced by CIJ (Compagnie Industrielle du Jouet) from 1924-35.

A country house car boot to raise funds for a newly opened specialist equestrian centre in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, will run at the 800-acre Isle Estate at Bicton near Shrewsbury on Sunday May 12.

Based in one of the great centres of English glass, Fieldings (20% buyer’s premium) of Stourbridge has been building its reputation for glass sales over the past 15 years and today “nobody sells more glass than we do”, says specialist Will Farmer.

After abandoning his early career as a contributor to Punch and the Illustrated London News, Myles Birket Foster (1825-99) went on to establish his reputation as a painter of technically skilled and highly polished watercolours, depicting landscapes and rustic subjects from Scotland to the Mediterranean.

Recalling the Marchioness of Townsend and Lady Stanhope at the Antiques for Everyone fair.

Among the most desirable of all needlework samplers are those associated with pupils at the Ackworth School, founded as a co-educational boarding school in 1779 by the Quaker physician John Fothergill and still thriving today.

In 1835, artist George Baxter (1804-67) patented his method for affordable, mass produced colour printing. The combination intaglio and relief process became known as the ‘Baxter method,’ and the resulting images are a window into how Victorians viewed the major events of the mid-19th century.

Whatever it may be, someone, somewhere will be avidly collecting it.

Iconic names in the worlds of glass and ceramics starred in Kingham & Orme’s (20% buyer’s premium) wide-ranging March 1 sale at Evesham.

The lot that gained all the publicity in a recent Shropshire sale, even national newspaper coverage, was a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.