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Sussex auction house Burstow & Hewett has withdrawn a rare Maori cloak after its imminent sale was met by online threats and abuse.

Dealer Ian Shaw sold this Tutsi shield, made of lightweight wood with natural pigment and offered for £13,000, to an interior designer from Denmark at last week’s 'Tribal Art London' fair.

The National Museums of Scotland has been revealed as the buyer of the Storrar Coverlet – a rare woollen textile withdrawn at the 11th hour from a sale at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh in August.

Could these be the opera glasses used by Mary Lincoln on the night her husband was assassinated? Colchester auction house Reeman Dansie will offer them for sale on September 24-25 with a guide price of £10,000-20,000.

ATG’s calendar of book auctions taking place in the UK and Ireland from September 10-26, 2019.

Entry card for 1823 auction sells in Gloucestershire saleroom nearly 200 years later

These two portraits – one painted in colourful hues by a known hand, the other unattributed and executed in monochrome – were the star picture lots at a lively auction in East Sussex.

Complete with 16 tissue-guarded photogravure plates in the original, stylish decorative cloth binding, one of 200 standard copies of Peter Henry Emerson’s famous Marsh Leaves of 1895 was the star turn in a recent Norfolk sale.

Benefiting from the continuing fashion for late 19th century novelty mantel clocks, a gilt-brass and steel example by Guilmet made the running at Peter Wilson (22% buyer’s premium) of Nantwich.

Japanese carved ivories of a tiger and an elephant soared far above estimate at Chorley’s (22% buyer’s premium).

Before an artist achieves ‘blue chip’ status, there is often a watershed moment in the market – a result – that makes people sit up and take note. For the Salford painter LS Lowry (1887-1976) this was the purchase of 'Going To The Match' in 1999 at Sotheby’s by the Professional Footballers’ Association.

John Smith, who died on February 24, was a well-known figure in the world of glass, contributing much to knowledge in this field and selling unusual and interesting glasses to museums and collectors all over the world. A Fellow of the Corning Museum of Glass from 2000, he had an international profile and vetted glass at the Maastricht fair in recent years.