London

Dealer Colnaghi is launching a foundation to bring Old Master paintings to a “21st century audience”.

The Doccia factory is perhaps best known for its hard-paste sculptures – many of them near-direct copies in porcelain of 17th and early 18th century bronzes. The key figure is the talented modeller Gaspero Bruschi, himself a Florentine sculptor.

A new book, The British Underground Press of the Sixties, marks the birth of the countercultural press and all the music, fashion and controversy it represented.

A complete list of exhibitors standing at the British Antique Dealers’ Association’s (BADA) inaugural collectors’ event has been announced.

Mr Benn is already the hero of his own series of illustrated children’s books and a 13-episode BBC animated programme. In his 50th year, however, there are displays of renewed interest in this adventurous everyman.

Mark Law’s deal to buy auction firm Dreweatts and the Mallett brand from stamp dealer group Stanley Gibbons has collapsed.

Thomas Del Mar (24% buyer’s premium) sold the first instalment of de-accessioned arms and armour from the John Woodman Higgins Museum in Massachusetts back in 2013 and a second in 2014.

The art market is “neither frothy nor depressed”, according to Sotheby’s chief executive Tad Smith.

Leading a 75-lot Brontë collection sold by Forum Auctions (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on July 10* was a set of two of the novels written by the sisters in the hugely productive years of 1846-47.

Design will meet art and antiques at a new street event timed to coincide with The London Design Festival this September. The art and antiques dealers of Church Street in London’s Lisson Grove have decided it is an ideal moment to launch their first-ever street party on September 24.

Fuchsia Voremberg works in the travel department at rare books and manuscripts specialist Maggs Bros in London

For many years auctioneers have been itching to move the finest arms and armour from the province of the specialist collector and establish them with a wider audience as works of art in their own right.

More 19th century art was offered in London when over 120 lots of European and Orientalist pictures went under the hammer at Christie’s.

Sporting guns are a little different from other areas of the arms and armour market in that many that are well over 100 years old are still in use today.