International

This pastel portrait by Maurice Quentin de la Tour is the potential star of the auction taking place at Drouot held by Kalck & Associés.

This Tiffany gold necklace and earclip suite composed of textured rose petal links by Angela Cummings (c.1944) sold for £10,200 at Bonhams Knightsbridge (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on March 15.

A 600-lot sale devoted to Asian art held by Tremont auctions in Newton, Massachusetts, on April 23 will include a 4ft (1.2m) high vase made in the late 19th century.

Otto von Guericke’s Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) magdeburgica de vacuo spatio… of 1672 describes the experiments in which he produced an air pump able to create a vacuum and thus demonstrate the pressure exerted by our atmosphere.

While Degas’ youthful drawings produced some notable individual prices in Drawings Week, it is the classic charcoal and pastel drawings of Parisian dancers and workers from his mature years that are the most commercially popular (the current work on paper record is the premium-inclusive $37m/ £23.35m/€29m paid for Danseuse au repos of 1879 at Sotheby’s New York in 2008).

A carte-de-visite album of the 1860s containing a previously unknown photograph of the abolitionist heroine Harriet Tubman was one of the high points of the March 30 sale held by Swann (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

Maastricht in March. It’s difficult to think of anything other than TEFAF within this setting, but one local dealer has established his own tradition, coinciding with but apart from the fair.

Among the raft of dedicated works on paper auctions staged for the recent Drawings Week in Paris were two market-fresh sales devoted to family collections of works by a single French artist.

The cusp of March to April is traditionally photo time in the Big Apple. It is the period when AIPAD (The Association of International Photography Art Dealers) stages The Photography Show, which is the main US fair for photography, and the point when the major New York auction houses put on the first of their biannual stateside series of photo auctions.

An audacious robbery in Amsterdam has left a dealer without insurance cover for the theft of more than 250 Asian works of art.

Christie’s is to appeal last month’s French court ruling that declared Droit de Suite is a charge on the vendor rather than the buyer.

Numerous bidders competed for a5½in (14cm) high Japanese incense burner from the Meiji period (1868-1912) at a sale held by Hargesheimer (25% buyer’s premium) in Dusseldorf on March 10-11.

One thing you could never accuse General George S Patton of was being shy. Not that top military men are exactly shrinking violets but even so, Patton is renowned as particularly bombastic. He fits perfectly into the type of American general in the Custer and MacArthur mould, happy to blow their own trumpets.

Published in New York in 1977, The Vanished World Portfolio is a selection of a dozen photographs from the very many that were taken in the late 1930s in Cracow, Warsaw, the Carpathian regions and elsewhere in eastern Europe by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990).

The Arctic Regions, 1873, a sumptuously bound narrative of American artist William Bradford’s seven expeditions to the Arctic, illustrated with 141 mounted albumen photographs, is the highest-estimated lot in the April 20 Swann Galleries photographs and photobooks sale.

Hans Christian Andersen did not confine himself to the fairy tales that are his principal and lasting legacy.

A French Old Master drawing, a 20th century work by a specialist animal painter and an American Abstract Expressionist work were among the pictures that have performed strongly in auctions across the German regions and in Austria recently.

A 50 ducat medal commemorating the end of the Russo-Persian war was worth far more than its weight in gold at Künker (23% buyer’s premium) in Osnabruck in the March 13-17 sale.

Daniel Quare (1648-1724) is primarily known as a clock and watchmaker. He was, however, also an accomplished maker of portable barometers, one of which came up for sale at Dorotheum (25/22/15% buyer’s premium) in Vienna on March 29.