Six international fairs and a spectacular sequence of sales confirm London's status as the capital of the art world as the June season gets under way

Apollo, June, 2004 by Susan Moore

The London summer season is always seen as quintessentially English as strawberries and cream--all hats and Henley, as it were, a moveable feast of Pimms and picnics, Ascot, Wimbledon, Glyndebourne and Grosvenor House. Yet June--and early July--see the city at its most cosmopolitan, and not only in terms of its visitors, In the next six weeks, the salerooms will be crammed with views and sales not just of British paintings and furniture but of everything from porcelain to Pop art. Dealers in a myriad of fields--be they recherche or cutting-edge contemporary--are flinging open their doors and the capital is host to no fewer than six international fairs and a new London Sculpture Week. This is when one becomes aware that London is still the art capital of the world with an art trade responsible for a quarter of the global $23,5bn art market--and this year it is loudly proclaiming the fact through a new initiative co-ordinating exhibitions and events, Art Fortnight London (www.artfortnightlondon.com). Anyone who presumed London in June was all about fusty brown furniture should take a look.

Even the eighteenth century British art is looking strikingly exotic. This year's jewel among the British pictures is Sir Joshua Roynolds's portrait of the dazzling Mrs Baldwin (Sotheby's, 1 July, estimate 3 million-4 million [pounds sterling]) seated cross legged and bedecked in a sumptuous Persian costume. The daughter of an English merchant based in Smyrna, she had married a rich Alexandrian merchant, later British Consul General in Egypt, and had travelled extensively in the Levant. Such was her beauty that when she visited Vienna in 1780, the Emperor Joseph was so entranced that he commissioned a portrait bust of her: when she arrived in London, both the Prince of Wales and Dr Johnson were charmed. So, presumably, was Reynolds, who painted her portrait in the costume she had worn to a royal ball in 1782. Despite its scale and grandeur, it was not a commissioned work; more one of Reynolds' 'trophies' of celebrities that he liked to paint to wow prospective clients and Reynolds plays to the gallery in glorying in the exoticism that so intrigued her European contemporaries.

Readers may be forgiven for thinking they have seen her at auction recently before, for another version of the painting graced a Christie's catalogue cover in November. It was withdrawn after Lord Landsdowne took exception to the auction house's claim that its picture, from a us collection, was likely to be earlier than the one that had been at Bowood House since 1813 and, appropriately enough perhaps, a beauty contest was staged for experts, with the two paintings side by side. The Christie's version, now deemed to have been painted partly by studio assistants, had been estimated at 700,000-1m [pounds sterling]; this one is now being offered by the Bowood trustees for considerably more No doubt the decision to sell was prompted in some part by Sotheby's success with another of Reynolds' exotic trophy portraits that of the Tahitian boy Omai, which it sold in 2001 for a phenomenal 10.3m [pounds sterling].

Fancy dress appears to be the order of the day, this time worn by Miss Edie Ramage, aged four and a half. Her appearance so struck another celebrated painter-baronet, Sir John Everett Millais, that immediately after the costume ball hosted by her uncle--the editor of The Graphic--he took her off to begin a portrait for her uncle which came with a price tag of 1,000 guineas. Thanks to its publication in the journal in 1800, the first 500,000 colour engravings after Cherry ripe--that 'sweet presentment of English Childhood', as Millais's son put--it flew off the press and made their way to the remotest corners of the British Empire. Given the fortune of Millais's no less affecting but infinitely less famous study of childhood innocence, Sleeping, at Christie's in 1999, one might presume that this, too, might fly to another far flung corner but for the fact that the colonial passion for Victorian genre painting--so long a backbone of this market--appears to be waning (Christie's, for instance, is selling off more of the Australian John Schaffer collection throughout the month). As for Cherry ripe, at the turn of the twentieth century she was sold to the distinguished collector Sir Joseph Robinson and now comes by descent to Sotheby's (on 1 July, estimate 800,000-1.2m [pounds sterling]).

Inevitably, the heritage hue and cry continues over the depletion of the Macclesfield Library at Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire, formed by the 1st and 2nd earls of Macclesfield before 1750 and one of the greatest libraries remaining in private hands in Britain. Of this first batch of four sales embracing the scientific books and western manuscripts, the highlight is the early-fourteenth-century psalter, previously known only to a few aficionados. Its 252 leaves includes two full-page miniatures and thousands of exquisite marginalia embracing a whole menagerie of birds and beasties, monsters, fables, grotesques and vignettes of daily life. Importantly, it appears to be in the same hand as that of the largely destroyed Douai Psalter, making this offering the most important work by one of the very great medieval East Anglian artists (Sotheby's, 22 June, estimate 800,000-1.2m [pounds sterling]).