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Many Chinese export porcelain forms were inspired by European silver or ceramic forms.

The ubiquitous First World War memorial plaques – the ‘death penny’ – need to have a posthumous recipient of note to sell for anything more than £50-100.

The highest single price posted in the regions during the autumn series of Asian art sales was the £380,000 bid at Duke’s (25% buyer’s premium) in Dorchester for a monumental Sino-Tibetan gilt bronze devotional figure of Tara broadly dated to the Qing period.

Indian talismanic shirts or Qur’an jama were believed to carry protective powers.

Thousands of items are available to buy from dealers online. Here we pick out one that caught our eye this week.

A round-up of art and antiques news from the previous seven days, including Sotheby's offering René Magritte’s 'L’empire des lumières'.

Christopher Dresser created a number of daring geometric designs for silver and silver-plated toast racks in the late 1870s and early 1880s, both for Hukin & Heath and for James Dixon & Son.

Still a figure of glamour 450 years after her execution, Mary Queen of Scots was reputed to have embroidered the c.16th century fragment of bed curtain sold at Hansons (25% buyer’s premium) at Etwall on December 7.

Despite his famous name, the artist Henry Strachey (1863-1940) has never had much prominence at auction, with only around a dozen works having emerged.

There are only three other known examples of this early David Hockney (b.1937) etching titled 'Self-Portrait (not in S.A.C. or Tokyo)'.

Our regular listing of UK and Irish book auctions.

Japanese antique ivories have been gradually disappearing from the catalogues of prominent dealers and major auction houses but good examples are still being sold in the regions.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the Nobel prize-winning poet, writer, composer, philosopher and social reformer, began to practise as an artist aged 60.

ATG picks out 16 recent stand-out items making waves in German, Austrian and Swiss salerooms

Perhaps the most identifiable production of the Daoguang period (1820-50) of the Qing empire is the medallion bowl.

Collections relating to leading British film director Lewis Gilbert (1920-2018) and his wife of 53 years Hylda (d.2005) provided very different lots for Billingshurst auction house Bellmans (22% buyer’s premium).

In Rodney Shirley’s monumental study of 'The Mapping of the World… 1472-1700', the very first entry is a simple, circular woodcut known as a ‘T-O’ map, one in which the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa are very simply shown as named segments.

The outstanding jade offered in the regions in the October-December period was this pale celadon teapot and cover that came for sale at Duke’s in Dorchester on December 8 from a Dutch private collection where it had been since the 1980s.

Bezoars (from the Persian pād-zahr meaning ‘poison antidote’) are the calcified concretion found in the stomachs of some animals. Prized for their supposed medicinal properties, until the Enlightenment science at the beginning of the 18th century they could sell for more than their weight in gold.

After 48 years dealing from a shop on New Kings Road in Fulham, dealer John Clay is closing his doors.