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COMMISSIONED in 1908 by the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Co., Mists of Yellowstone, one of many pictures of what is now the Yellowstone National Park region painted by Thomas Moran, nearly doubled the previous saleroom best for the artist on July 29. It made $4.4m (£2.42m) in the grand ballroom of the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino in Reno, Nevada – where Coeur d’Alene Art hold an annual auction, the big event of the year for well-heeled lovers of Western art.

BONHAMS have named two of their most senior specialists as joint deputy chairmen of the company.

IN rebacked old panelled calf, a 1584 first edition of Welsh historian David Powell’s “corrected, augmented and continued” version of the Historie of Cambria, now called Wales left in manuscript form by Hugh Lhuyd, was sold for £1350 in a Lawrences of Crewkerne sale of July 6.

IN Antiques Trade Gazette No.1655, I illustrated a first octavo edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, 1840-44, that sold for $48,000 (£25,920) in a May sale held by Northeast Auctions of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In their August 21-22 sale they had another, half morocco bound and rather better looking set – one originally sold by Clarendon Harris, a book dealer of Worcester, Mass – which made $64,000 (£35,200).

ACCORDING to Hertfordshire organiser Paul Bishop, who works as Oxbridge Fairs, the attendance was up at his fourth Cambridge Glass Fair, held at Chilford Hall Vineyard on September 12.

AN Americana sale held by Eldreds of East Dennis on August 5-6 included a number of works by Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr. (1910-82), a Cape Cod artist for whom mermaids and sailors, lighthouses and balloons were key themes, and the picture top right, a late addition to the catalogue, proved one of the Massachusetts sale’s greater successes, at $40,000 (£22,000).

SUSPICION that the market for Irish pictures, at least on this side of the Irish Sea, might be in a softer state than it was three or four years ago, were dramatically dispelled at the Guildford rooms of Clarke Gammon Weller (15% buyer’s premium) on September 7 when a rather late, but completely fresh-to-market, canvas by Paul Henry (1876-1958) was offered.