News topics

Parents will now be shelling out hundreds of pounds as kids fill up football World Cup sticker albums and negotiate playground swaps in a now time-honoured fashion. Back in the mid-19th century the photo collecting craze was all about the carte de visite, as a May 3 auction underlines.

Art and antiques exports from the UK continued to fall in 2017, recording a decline of 2.2% to £4.84bn, according to UK trade figures from HMRC. At the same time, there were areas of significant growth, including exports to China which rose by 350% to £115.9m in 2017.

A handwritten manuscript of a Sherlock Holmes story featuring a cipher devised by author Arthur Conan Doyle goes under the hammer this month in Dallas, Texas.

Nancy Mitford was so enamoured with a particular bed that she wrote about it lovingly in the 1950s.

A look at the latest moves in the trade.

A rare 17th century depiction of an African man in Europe by Peter Paul Rubens has been placed under a temporary export bar in an attempt to keep it in the country.

Sotheby’s is to return to holding auctions in India to take advantage of the growing wealth in the Asian nation.

Five early works by Gauguin that have never before been on the market and a landscape by van Gogh that has spent eight years hanging in the Van Gogh Museum are to be offered at auction in Paris in June as part of Artcurial’s auction of Impressionist and Modern art.

Sotheby’s is retreating on its pledge to scrap fees for purchasers at its online-only auctions.

The administrator of collapsed Australian auction house Mossgreen has been ordered to return thousands of lots after Federal Court ruled it did not have the right to charge clients fees to collect their own goods.

Australian art starred at Russell Crowe’s ‘divorce auction’, which took place with much fanfare and festivity at Sotheby’s Australia on Saturday.

Sotheby’s spring Hong Kong series included a trio of eight-figure Chinese imperial works of art.

When a piece of Hans Coper stoneware made an astonishing £305,000 hammer price from an online bid recently it posed a classic ‘state of the market’ question.