Old Masters

Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ set the highest price ever for an artwork sold at auction when it took $400m ($450m with premium) at Christie’s New York last night.

Sandro Botticelli is one of the best-known names in the lexicon of art history and his Birth of Venus in the Uffizi is one of the world's most famous art images. Later this month a painting by the Renaissance master and his studio goes under the hammer at the Drouot auction centre in Paris.

A 17th-century Dutch painting looted during the Second World War, which has been in the collection of the Lord Mayor of the City of London since the 1980s, is finally being returned to its rightful heir.

A recently rediscovered landscape by British painter John Constable (1776-1837) will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s next month.

Oxford saleroom Mallams will offer a John Constable (1776-1837) landscape drawing on October 18. It will be estimated at £12,000-15,000.

Christie’s will offer Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ at a New York auction next month. It will carry an estimate 'in the region of' $100m.

Colnaghi has confirmed the launch of its Colnaghi Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation to promote Old Masters and antiquities to a 21st century audience.

Old master dealership Colnaghi is to open a gallery in New York and will expand into ancient art with the hiring of a new director from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dealer Bendor Grosvenor’s returning series ‘Britain’s Lost Masterpieces’ has discovered a work by Flemish artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens in a National Trust property in Glasgow.

Sotheby’s is offering a fine painting by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) at its Old Master evening sale in December. It comes to auction with an unbroken provenance going back well over a century and is estimated at £2.5m-3.5m.