Roll up, roll up for Maastricht! The year's largest and best-known art fair is offering a Roman Paris, renaissance manuscripts, a Perugino, and, just for good measure, an unpublished Matisse

Apollo, March, 2005 by Susan Moore

One of the highlights of the Modern section promises to be Matisse's previously unpublished 1937 maquette for the cover of the review magazine Verve, published by the artist's friend Teriade, unveiled by James Roundell of London's Dickinson (Fig. 2). And just to emphasise the point about the scale of Maastricht's exhibition space, Brussels dealer Philippe Denis shows Fernand Leger's Composition a l'atelier, a monumental wall painting comprising ten panels of fibro-concrete.

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Silver shines in New York, while Palm Beach earns Old Master status: results from the American sales

There are good times to sell particular works of art, and there are bad times. The bad times are when the taste of the day decrees an object, period or taste unfashionable; the good times can be illustrated perfectly by the sale of the Rowler Collection at Christie's, New York, on 19 January. This gathering of silver from the Copenhagen workshops of Georg Jensen was the largest and most comprehensive in private hands. Its owner, working with London specialist dealers the Silver Fund, put together this collection in just seven years and shrewdly offered it at auction in the firm's centenary year at a time when interest in modern design and its pioneers is at a high. Given that just about every smart us apartment has relinquished eighteenth-century France or England in favour of art deco, post-War or contemporary furniture and design, this sale was an opportunity just too good to miss, and had buyers competing frantically over its highly usable table centrepieces, candelabra and flatware. 'The sale found a whole new buyer demographic,' said Christie's silver specialist Jeanne Sloane.

The top lot proved to be a monumental pair of rather austere five-light candelabra designed by Harald Nielsen around 1940 that doubled expectations to sell for $204,000 (109,090 [pounds sterling]). More extraordinary was the instantly recognisable silver flatware service designed by Jensen himself (Fig. 6), which soared four times over estimate to change hands at $180,000 (96,256 [pounds sterling]). In all, the sale, which was 99 per cent sold by value, nearly tripled its pre-sale estimate to realise $8.8m. It made old silver look like a steal.

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There was not much that could be called a steal in New York's Old Master sales, save for Baron Gerard's fine Portrait of the Duchesse de Montebello, which sold on a single bid for $2.2m at Sotheby's Art of the Enlightenment sale on 27 January. Pickings were fairly slim this Old Master season but the results, in terms of sale percentages, were encouragingly higher than for London's December sales. Astonishing prices were found for the two busts in the same sale by the Austrian court sculptor Franz Xaver Messerchmidt, also illustrated last month. The better of the two, the so-called III-humoured man, expected to fetch $300,000-$500,000, was finally knocked down to the Louvre for an extraordinary $4.8m (2.5m [pounds sterling]), while an Italian collector, the designer Girolamo Etro, paid $2.4m (1.3m [pounds sterling])-a huge price given its relative quality--for the Incapable bassoonist (estimate $150,000-$200,000). Perhaps no less astonishing were the prices paid for copies after Titian and Van Dyck in the Berkman estate sale on 28 January--both raised over $300,000 against five-figure estimates. Rumours were flying about Russian buyers going crazy.