Auctioneers

Victorian arts journal was first to be illustrated with a photograph to promote Fox Talbot book

This Dutch East Indies gold mounted tortoiseshell betel box hammered at £15,000 (plus 24% buyer’s premium) on the opening day of the sale held by Mellors & Kirk in Nottingham on February 11-12.

The fashion for eye miniatures – or lover’s eyes – is said to have begun with a politically and socially unacceptable royal affair.

A gentleman (Dukatenscheißer) with his trousers pulled down excreting a gilt metal coin from his bottom or a composition nodder of a grotesque women beating a child might not be for everyone.

Estimated at £200-300 but sold for £4200 at Charterhouse (25% buyer’s premium) in Sherborne, Dorset, were two design books from the Royal Doulton workshop floor.

A 16th century bible in German was the most expensive book sold at auction in the UK in December.

Paintings depicting humble carpenter and not-so-humble locksmith benefit from market freshness

The latest jobs moves and appointments across the world of art and antiques

Sir Bruno Welby (b.1928), a member of both the English Ceramic Circle and the French Porcelain Society, has bought European porcelain since the 1950s.

The Sir Bruno Welby collection (see main story in this edition) sold at Woolley & Wallis shone the spotlight on two familiar names from the early English porcelain literature: Jefferyes Hamett O’Neale (1719/20-97) and Fidelle Duvivier (1740-after 1796).

The top lot in Potter & Potter’s (25% buyer’s premium) latest Wunderkammer Sale was Gustave Vichy’s (1839-1904) 'Aubade a la lune' (Serenade to the Moon) mechanical automaton. It is considered a signature model of the firm.