News

Christie’s will launch a new series of sales in the New Year aimed at creating a “one stop shopping experience” for dealers, decorators and particularly private buyers.

Sotheby’s board of directors has told its managers to meet with representatives of Alfred Taubman to discuss the possible sale of his controlling stake in the company.

THE Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is to be the new home for Federico Barocci’s £1.3m drawing Study for The Institution of the Eucharist.

The inaugural specialist sale of some 350 character jugs at the Stoke on Trent ceramics auctioneers Potteries Specialist Auction (12.5% buyer’s premium) on November 17 was, said the auctioneers, a great success with specialist UK dealers and collectors flocking to the Cobridge rooms.

Retrouvius of Kensal Green, London, is an architectural reclamation and design partnership founded in 1993 by Adam Hills and Maria Speake, both of whom had previously studied architecture at Glasgow School of Art.

Dealers often complain about the way that private bidders get over-excited at auctions and pay ridiculously inflated prices they wouldn’t dream of giving in a gallery. But for once it looks - or rather looked – as if a major player in the trade had suffered a serious attack of auction fever following Jermyn Street agent Guy Morrison’s terse admission that he was now the happy owner of £9.4m Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) portrait.

It is not usually understood that the prophet Mohammed did not actually ban images. This came about some 60 years after his death. In very late AH77 (696AD) the then caliph instituted an epigraphic gold coinage: the dinar (cf. Latin: denarius).