Auctioneers

A major attraction in a PBA Galleries (20/15% buyer’s premium) sale of April 6 was the Samuel Hessel ‘DNA’ collection of scientific papers, journals and books.

A Beatrix Potter collection running to 62 lots got a Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) sale of March 30 up and running.

Victorian exuberance or Georgian elegance – you pays your money and takes your choice. At Lyon & Turnbull (25% buyer’s premium) on April 5, it cost a great deal for the former and rather less for the latter.

Pictured here is one of several etchings by James Abbott McNeil Whistler that will feature in Swann Galleries’ sale of prints on May 2.

A mid-19th century oil painting depicting in detail a scene at the height of the Australian gold rush is a potential highlight of a Sotheby’s Australia sale next month.

Estimated at £500-800, a small Old Master painting of Christ wearing the crown of thorns drew spectacular competition at Adam’s of Dublin on April 9. It came from an institution in the Irish capital which the saleroom said was “doing some spring cleaning”. It was given the pick of around 100 paintings.

A small 6¼ x 11in (16 x 27 cm) oil on canvas by Nicolas De Staël (1914-55), titled Composition and dating from 1950, is one of the potential highlights of the contemporary art auction to be held by Dorotheum in Vienna on May 31 and June 1.

Johannes Schröder (1870-1942) was not only a wealthy German merchant but also a globetrotter and a pioneer in utilising the invention of photography to document his time.

An intriguing 18th century watercolour of a tree struck by lightning fetched a multi-estimate sum at Forum Auctions’ (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) March 30 sale in London.

Offered by Keys (20% buyer’s premium) on April 6, the Sir Malcolm Arnold Collection proved to be a problematic one.

Confirmation of market tastes in horology could be gleaned from major spring sales in the provinces...

Published in 1631 in Rinteln, a small town in Lower Saxony, Friederich Spee’s Cautio Criminalis, seu de Processibus Contra Sagas is a first edition in much later boards of a book that has been described as the first serious attack on witchcraft trials and their use of torture.

Almost exactly a year after setting an auction record for modern British painter Sir Cedric Morris (1889-1982), the Henry Adams saleroom has done it again.