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Shanklin Auction Rooms have taken what they believe to be a record price for a Worcester teapot. The Isle of Wight auctioneers expected a bid of around £1000 for the rare c.1760, 5in (13cm), first period Worcester pot (pictured) and were amazed to see it knocked down to a London dealer for £11,000 (plus 10 per cent buyer’s premium).

IRISH auctioneers have long been adamant that Irish pictures sell better in Ireland and certainly the 71 per cent sold by lot achieved at James Adam (15% buyer’s premium) in Dublin on May 29 was only just shy of the 76 per cent by lot selling rate taken at Christie’s Irish sale in London on May 17.

THIS most unusual looking beast is expected to be the star lot at a sale to be held in Paris on July 4 at a most unusual location, the pagoda-like Maison Chinoise, rue de Courcelles, Paris 8.

Back on April 9 and 10 Bonhams (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) Bond Street rooms offered a double helping of portrait miniatures on consecutive days: a 165-lot single owner and a 133-lot mixed-vendor sale, both of which saw around three-quarters of their contents get away.

On the same day that Christie’s King Street rooms were offering pieces from the upper-crust end of the portrait miniatures and vertu market, their South Kensington (17/510% buyer’s premium) rooms had a more bread-and-butter selection of the same material.

A new auction record for any antiquity was set at Christie’s last week on June 13 when the 5ft 3in (1.6m) high ancient Roman marble statue of Venus, pictured right, sold for £7.2m.

AT the time it was produced – 1930/31 – the geometric design of a Shelley tea set with triangular handles was far from popular and speedily withdrawn. Seven decades on, with Art Deco a buoyant area and Shelley becoming more in demand by collectors, the scarcity of the pattern was a considerable addition to the appeal of a tea set for six offered at Stride’s 1000-lot West Sussex sale.