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ACQUIRED for £52,000 by the Australian businessman John Schaeffer at Christie’s, London in June 1996, this striking oil on canvas, right, A Dancing Athlete with an Olive Branch, by Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), comes under the hammer again on May 15.

ANTIQUE folk art specialist Robert Young’s distinctive stock has found favour both here and in America, very often at fairs, but from May 14 to 22 you can see some choice pieces displayed on his home patch at the fifth annual exhibition at his showrooms at 68 Battersea Bridge Road, London SW11.

JOHN Varley Senior (1778-1842) was one of the most prolific watercolourists of his generation, exhibiting no fewer than 700 works at the Old Water Colour Society between 1805 and 1842.

TWO albums of 19th century Chinese photographs assembled by a British diplomat sold for £5200 in a general antiques sale held by Sworders at Stansted Mountfitchet, on March 30.

A SUBSTANTIAL reward is being offered after thieves smashed a dealer’s car window and made off with a large amount of jewellery at Sandown Park Fair on April 27.

ONE of the most acclaimed exhibitions of the late March Asian Art Week in New York was London dealers’ Rossi & Rossi’s show Styles from the Steppes: Silk Costumes and Textiles from the Liao and Yuan Periods.

SATISFYING though Woolley & Wallis’s sale undoubtedly was, the general run of fine silver is still bringing little more than the prices it was achieving a decade and more back.

SINCE moving to premises in Kennetholme, Midgham, Berkshire’s Specialist Auction Services (15% buyer’s premium) have acquired a reputation for selling not just commemoratives and pot lids but also collectable toys.

FOUR house clearances of properties each valued at over £1m meant some long and frantic hours of valuing and cataloguing for Wellers (15% buyer's premium)auctioneer Tim Duggan – three heavy weeks rewarded when the March 13 sale day was one of the best ever at the Surrey rooms with 95 per cent of the 1200 lots getting away notching up a total of well over £100,000.

BOOKS, manuscripts and photographs from The Old Rectory, at Banningham in Norfolk, provided a separately catalogued section of a three-day March 21-23 contents sale conducted by Bonhams and represented 70 years of collecting by the owner, picture restorer Bryan Hall, and his father, the Rev. William Hall, who was at one time Vicar of Barton Turf and Smallburgh.

SIX lots from Bonhams' (17.5/10% buyer's premium) March 22-24 sale at The Old Rectory, Banningham will be making their way back whence they came, National Trust curators having identified them (Bonhams had only spotted one) as having been bought by the Rev. Hall & Son at the 1951 contents sale of Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk. The house now belongs to the Trust which rescued it from demolition.

THE strength of the decorative market was underlined by a number of lots offered by Woolley & Wallis, (15% buyer’s premium) on March 16, including the day’s best seller, a pair of c.1860 bronze and ormolu twin-light candelabra, one shown right.

THE British Numismatic Trade Association have just issued a notice to their members about a new European Union import tax. As from March 1 an ad valorem duty has been imposed on any United States Mint modern products imported into the European Union under the following codes – 71189000 and 71181010.

THE Paris expert Alain Weill makes a habit of holding sales which are rather more interesting than those of many of his colleagues. For sure they have a strong Gallic slant, but then sales in London are strongly biased towards the British series.

Christie’s South Kensington (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) hold three Scientific Instruments sale a year but reserve the spring sale for a restricted number of high-quality objects. Tom Newth, head of the department, reports the market picking up in the last six months, with strong competition for microscopes and Islamic astronomical instruments.

THE March 5 sale at Dee Atkinson & Harrison's (10% buyer's premium) West Yorkshire saleroom was the first antiques offering of the year and, after an 83 per cent selling rate on nearly 700 lots, the auctioneers took encouragement from the way the market seemed to be picking up, with furniture, at last, edging out of the doldrums.

THERE was no doubt about which were the two outstanding lots at Hamptons’ (15% buyer’s premium) March 24 picture sale in Godalming.

UNLIKE the market for oil paintings, where traditional images appear to be going through something of a mini-revival, print auctions show signs of being a sector where the critical mass of demand has shifted permanently towards Modern and Contemporary.

ONE notable item from the Bonhams & Butterfields sale of March 23 was a rare copy of Jacques Gautier d’Agoty’s colour printed Anatomie de la Tête of 1748 that made $19,000 (£10,220) – but not the top price lot, a Gershwin sketchbook that made $100,000, or indeed several other interesting items.

TOWARDS the end of March it was reported that The British Museum and the V&A had joined forces for the first time to acquire a rare Indian 7th century metal statue of a standing figure of the Buddha Sakyamuni, the first to enter a public European collection. After a tour of provincial museums it will be shown alternatively at the two institutions.