Auctioneers

A South Pacific ula throwing club and a Maori canoe bailer that once belonged to an English reverend killed by cannibals in Vanuatu in the 19th century has sold at an auction at Duke's Auctioneers in Dorchester.

Sotheby’s Australia will auction what it calls “the most significant collection of historical international art” offered in the country later this month.

In the year of the 150th anniversary of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s birth, Lyon & Turnbull has sold the very key used to open the artist’s masterpiece The Glasgow School of Art in 1899.

One of seven known examples of ‘the first gold coin struck in the US’ – the 1787 New York Brasher Doubloon – has sold for more than $5m in a private deal.

Princess Michael of Kent returned to Sworders 10 years after she had opened the Essex firm's new saleroom for an auction preview this week.

Parents will now be shelling out hundreds of pounds as kids fill up football World Cup sticker albums and negotiate playground swaps in a now time-honoured fashion. Back in the mid-19th century the photo collecting craze was all about the carte de visite, as a May 3 auction underlines.

An exceptionally rare Western Zhou bronze, taken when the Summer Palace was sacked by British troops in 1860, has sold for £410,000, four times its lower estimate.

A handwritten manuscript of a Sherlock Holmes story featuring a cipher devised by author Arthur Conan Doyle goes under the hammer this month in Dallas, Texas.

Nancy Mitford was so enamoured with a particular bed that she wrote about it lovingly in the 1950s.

Sotheby’s is to return to holding auctions in India to take advantage of the growing wealth in the Asian nation.

Five early works by Gauguin that have never before been on the market and a landscape by van Gogh that has spent eight years hanging in the Van Gogh Museum are to be offered at auction in Paris in June as part of Artcurial’s auction of Impressionist and Modern art.

Sotheby’s is retreating on its pledge to scrap fees for purchasers at its online-only auctions.

The administrator of collapsed Australian auction house Mossgreen has been ordered to return thousands of lots after Federal Court ruled it did not have the right to charge clients fees to collect their own goods.

Sotheby’s spring Hong Kong series included a trio of eight-figure Chinese imperial works of art.

When a piece of Hans Coper stoneware made an astonishing £305,000 hammer price from an online bid recently it posed a classic ‘state of the market’ question.