Europe

These outsize tongs, below, proved the major surprise at Adam’s (20% buyer’s premium) in Dublin on June 17.

Over 20 years ago, leading art and antiques dealers in the picturesque Bavarian city of Bamberg came up with the idea of holding a coordinated summer sales exhibition.

Magic lanterns, peep shows and various other optical illusory and viewing devices will be on sale at a specialist Cologne auction firm offering photographic, scientific and collectors’ apparatus.

A Washington DC appeals court has upheld a decision to allow a ‘Nazi forced sale’ claim against a collection of medieval devotional art to go to trial in the US.

Vincennes, Sèvres and Meissen are among the stars of a Paris and London auction spotlight.

Irish silver was popular at Adam’s (20% buyer’s premium) in June – see ATG next week – and Irish furniture did well enough, with a c.1830 serpentine side table with marble-and-malachite top getting away at €8000 (£7000).

There has long been a tradition of summer sales in Monaco, with an emphasis on the luxury goods area of the market: jewellery, watches, handbags and cars. Here are a few stand-out lots coming up.

Legend has it that, while on safari in Africa with her lover and employer Louis Cartier, Jeanne Toussaint spotted a panther and immediately exclaimed: “Onyx, diamonds, emeralds – a brooch!” The Cartier range of feline jewels was born.

Unmistakably the work of the Viennese avant-garde, this gem-set silver plated table clock sold for €205,000 (£186,000) at a recent sale held by the Rotterdam auctioneer Vendu Notarishuis.

The antiquarian book trade is lobbying for changes to the proposed EU law designed to crack down on imports of cultural goods ‘more than 250 years old’.

A rare medieval gold head of a saint generated significant interest at a sale in Paris conducted by Pierre Bergé & Associés at the Hôtel Drouot.

The Paris high season is a time when classic sales of traditional fare are as much to the fore as buoyant sectors such as Asian, contemporary and modern and tribal art.

This portrait of Maria Luisa Maldonado, Marquesa de Torneros (1907) by the Valencian artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923) is a highlight of the next auction series at Ansorena to be held from July 17-19.

Stuttgart auction house Nagel (33% buyer’s premium) held its summer sale of Asian art in Salzburg having acquired an impressive array of quality pieces from European and other collections.

The mammoth disposal of the Aristophil collections of historic manuscripts began last week with a premium-inclusive €17.6m series of seven June auctions offered over four days at Drouot (June 15 and 18-20).