London

'Cave Painting I' by British artist Jean Cooke (1927- 2008) is among the works on offer at Piano Nobile’s exhibition 'A Modern Venus'.

Adam Smith’s own copy bearing his simple bookplate makes £750,000 in London auction.

Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-98) was the toast of London during the latest Victorian art sales held in the capital, where buyers continued to covet blue-chip Pre-Raphaelite art, market-fresh material – and invest in female names.

A trademark nocturnal scene by Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-93) got away on low estimate for £80,000 at John Nicholson’s (25% buyer’s premium) of Haslemere in Surrey.

New independent art fair targets younger and fresh customers with competitive prices

'A Book of Songs and Poems from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha', the Ashendene Press book of 1904 shown below, has in the past made as much as £2000 at auction.

For many years New York’s major salerooms mounted auction series of Old Master paintings, drawings and sculpture in the first months of the year immediately following their Americana series.

At the very end of the 15th century, in Venice in December 1499, there emerged from the presses of that city’s most famous printer, Aldus Manutius, what is traditionally described as the most beautiful illustrated printed book of the Italian Renaissance.

Dated April 5, 1768, the simple printed broadside shown below lays down the ‘Rules…’ that apply to those wishing to use the Circulating Library in Ashbo[u]rne in Derbyshire.

Works by major names in modern art are available in north London this month. The annual London Art Fair might have a contemporary focus, with many of the attending dealerships and surrounding projects concentrating on recent works, but a healthy supply of older 20th century art for buyers is available to snap up from established galleries.

While £90,000 is an awful lot of money for an empty metal box, this old black painted and gold lettered deed box does bear the magic name of Winston Churchill.

“Every specialist has an object that they dream of having in their sales,” says Matthew Rubinger, Christie’s head of handbags and accessories. “For me, it’s the aluminium Explorer trunk by Louis Vuitton. The market is full of silver-coloured metal trunks, but this piece is their inspiration.”

Illuminated manuscript sales of recent times will be the subject of a future review, but seen here is something a little different in that line offered as the very first lot in a December 1 sale of such material held by Bloomsbury Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium).

A copy of WB Yeats’ The Wanderings of Oisin… offered in a recent Irish sale was an example of Fisher Unwin’s 1892 second issue. That is rare enough, but this copy bore an inscription that made it very special indeed.