Europe

The German state has appealed against a landmark US court judgment that allowed three US citizens to proceed with a case seeking the restitution of an important collection of medieval devotional art.

Estimated at £500-800, a small Old Master painting of Christ wearing the crown of thorns drew spectacular competition at Adam’s of Dublin on April 9. It came from an institution in the Irish capital which the saleroom said was “doing some spring cleaning”. It was given the pick of around 100 paintings.

A small 6¼ x 11in (16 x 27 cm) oil on canvas by Nicolas De Staël (1914-55), titled Composition and dating from 1950, is one of the potential highlights of the contemporary art auction to be held by Dorotheum in Vienna on May 31 and June 1.

Tintin has had another good day out in Paris. In an Artcurial sale on April 8 a European collector paid €753,000 (£643,815), including premiums and taxes, to buy an ink drawing done by Hergé for the 1937 comic book Tintin in America.

Maastricht in March. It’s difficult to think of anything other than TEFAF within this setting, but one local dealer has established his own tradition, coinciding with but apart from the fair.

Among the raft of dedicated works on paper auctions staged for the recent Drawings Week in Paris were two market-fresh sales devoted to family collections of works by a single French artist.

While Degas’ youthful drawings produced some notable individual prices in Drawings Week, it is the classic charcoal and pastel drawings of Parisian dancers and workers from his mature years that are the most commercially popular (the current work on paper record is the premium-inclusive $37m/ £23.35m/€29m paid for Danseuse au repos of 1879 at Sotheby’s New York in 2008).

Marielle Barde, Edgar Degas’ great-niece, was one of the heirs and vendors of the Degas studio drawings and attended Christie’s Paris sale. This was the second such dispersal the family had held in these rooms of artworks from her famous great-uncle following a house move some decades ago.

This pastel portrait by Maurice Quentin de la Tour is the potential star of the auction taking place at Drouot held by Kalck & Associés.

Otto von Guericke’s Experimenta nova (ut vocantur) magdeburgica de vacuo spatio… of 1672 describes the experiments in which he produced an air pump able to create a vacuum and thus demonstrate the pressure exerted by our atmosphere.

An audacious robbery in Amsterdam has left a dealer without insurance cover for the theft of more than 250 Asian works of art.

Christie’s is to appeal last month’s French court ruling that declared Droit de Suite is a charge on the vendor rather than the buyer.

Daniel Quare (1648-1724) is primarily known as a clock and watchmaker. He was, however, also an accomplished maker of portable barometers, one of which came up for sale at Dorotheum (25/22/15% buyer’s premium) in Vienna on March 29.

One thing you could never accuse General George S Patton of was being shy. Not that top military men are exactly shrinking violets but even so, Patton is renowned as particularly bombastic. He fits perfectly into the type of American general in the Custer and MacArthur mould, happy to blow their own trumpets.

Published in New York in 1977, The Vanished World Portfolio is a selection of a dozen photographs from the very many that were taken in the late 1930s in Cracow, Warsaw, the Carpathian regions and elsewhere in eastern Europe by Roman Vishniac (1897-1990).

Hans Christian Andersen did not confine himself to the fairy tales that are his principal and lasting legacy.