A pair of comfortable Gonse chairs brought last year’s sales to a splendid end, with Old Master drawings set to star at auctions and fairs early in 2026

From George Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in society to Ford Madox Brown’s heroically monumental celebration of manual labour, artists gave individual interpretations of work, as Michael Hall reveals

The sale of a Fabergé imperial egg and a 15th-century triptych made headlines last year, but one of the most powerful pieces was a painting by Richard Parkes Bonington showing what he could have become, had he not died so young

The most sensual pictures of women sprang from Ovid’s verses, the Aeneid gave Turner his longest-lasting subject matter and Edward Burne-Jones saw himself in Arthur’s deathless slumber. Carla Passino explores how literature influenced art

A CURATION OF THE BEST DESIGN AND HOME IDEAS

Rarely does a ‘working’ diamond tiara come up for sale, so interest sky-rocketed when a tiara worn by Virginia Fortune Ryan Ogilvy – Dowager Countess of Airlie and Lady of the Bedchamber to the late Q