London

The British Art Fair is an annual feeding ground for collectors of modern and post-war British art. This year’s staging of the 30-year-old event, which runs from September 20-23, marks a new chapter for the fair as it moves to London’s Saatchi Gallery.

Bonhams’ chairman Robert Brooks is retiring from the auction house after selling the company to private equity group Epiris.

Posters advertising the first-ever public screening of a film, which took place in Paris in 1895, have hardly ever emerged outside France. While one is known in an American collection, the appearance of another at Sotheby’s latest online film posters auction understandably caused some excitement.

Wide-ranging Lyell family archive brings high prices across the board in London.

Known familiarly as the ‘Audley End Lydgate’, the mid-15th century vellum manuscript shown below is ‘The Fall of Princes’, a Middle English version by the poet John Lydgate of Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus virorum illustrium.

“Isn’t it possible that the Irish could be just as brilliant in the visual arts as they have been in music and literature?”

Romanians, Hungarians, Saxons, Roma and Russians have all historically lived in the area in central Romania known as Transylvania. Each group had its own distinct culture, but after years of living side-by-side these ‘families’ drew inspiration from one another.

Alison Davis and Alan Old, who run So Last Century, organiser of quality, 20th century vintage markets at three venues in south London, are heading up north.

The UK government will ensure that ivory regulations are balanced and with “appropriate exemptions”, the new minister for arts, heritage and tourism told the Art Business Conference last week.

An unpublished letter written by Nelson Mandela from his prison cell on Robben Island is to be offered at Bonhams’ South African sale in New Bond Street on September 14.

Sotheby’s is to test the temperature of the market for Japanese art with its first dedicated sale in London for more than a decade.

Derbyshire’s Hansons Auctioneers is opening a second London location.