Auctioneers

Rupert Powell has resigned as deputy chairman of Bloomsbury Auctions where he has worked for 31 years. He will work out a notice period.

The highlight of Bainbridges latest sale in West Ruislip was a 1560 Geneva Bible which sold for £8500.

Dix Noonan Webb have achieved the second highest price for a George Cross just eight months after selling the GC awarded to the secret agent Violette Szabo for a record £260,000.

The auditors for Stanley Gibbons, the venerable collectables dealership and parent company of Dreweatts Bloomsbury, Mallett and AH Baldwin, have resigned because they believe the firm is exposed to excessive risk.

The so-called Lucerne pattern, decorated in primary colours with a stylised Mediterranean chateau in a landscape, ranks among the scarcest and most desirable of all designs from Clarice Cliff’s ‘Appliqué’ range.

Cased fish, once the only acceptable face of the taxidermy market, have cooled since the 1990s when prices in excess of £3000 were commonplace.

Originally from Lymm in Cheshire, Elizabeth Pulman (née Chadd) (1836-1900) is regarded as the first professional female photographer in New Zealand.

Sotheby’s are offering 180 lots of English and continental furniture and works of art from the ‘public and private collections’ of Alan Rubin, director of London and Paris dealership Pelham Galleries.

‘History has been made at Mallams today’ trumpeted the firm’s Twitter feed.

A Steinway grand piano sold for a double-estimate £95,000 on February 24 when Christie’s King Street held a £3m, 146-lot sale of items from the former Queen Anne’s Gate home of musician Sting and his wife Trudie Styler.

Paul Iribe’s ‘Nautile’ armchair is one of the most striking proto-Art Deco designs, with its sleek swept-back lines and low armrests formed as a tight nautilus shell spiral.

This rare early 19th century Chinese gilt decorated export lacquer model of a paddle steamer sold for £7000 at Duke’s of Dorchester.

Melanie Clore, Sotheby’s European chairman and co-chairman of Impressionist & Modern art, is leaving at the end of February after 35 years at the auction house.

Sotheby’s London will be showing hundreds of previously unseen jewellery drawings in a one-off exhibition from February 18-March 8, sourced from a privately owned collection of jewellery and silver.

Bonhams are to launch a new range of monthly Home & Interiors auctions in both their Knightsbridge and Edinburgh rooms.

The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool have an auctioneer to thank for the inclusion of three previously unseen works in the exhibition Pre-Raphaelites: Beauty and Rebellion that opened earlier this month.

A 1957 Ferrari 355 S Scaglietti sold at the Artcurial Motorcars auction for €32.1m (£24.7m) with premium to an international collector after “a tense, 11-minute bidding battle”.

The Contemporary art market survived better than many had expected at the London auction series last week.

A previously unknown seventh edition of the Bay Psalm Book, published in Boston, 1693, with a provenance tied to Salem witch trial judge Jonathan Corwin and descendants of John Proctor, sold for $221,000 (£151,584) at a Swann sale in New York on February 4.

This 18½in (47cm) George II silver soup tureen by the goldsmith Paul de Lamerie featured in Doyle’s latest sale of furniture, works of art and Old Master paintings in New York.