A Victorian taxidermy chihuahua that fetched more than 20 times its estimate

It’s neck and neck between Christie’s and Sotheby’s as the two big auctioneers release sales information for 2011. Sotheby’s notched up auction sales of $4.9 billion (£3.1 billion) in the year, and last week Christie’s announced auction sales of precisely the same amount, both up by about 14 per cent when calculated in dollars. Now it’s down to who conducted the most private sales, an increasing part of both businesses that is conducted behind closed doors. Christie’s has announced it sold $808.6 million of art and collectibles privately last year, an increase of 44 per cent on the previous year and constituting a substantial 14 per cent of its business. Sotheby’s private sales have also been increasing, and these figures will be announced at the end of the month. In its breakdown of the figures, Christie’s signalled the changes that are taking place in the art market as Impressionist and Modern Art sales slipped down to third place behind the leader, Contemporary Art, followed for the first time by Asian art.

Surprise result of the week must go to the two Victorian taxidermy chihuahuas that were offered at Christie’s as part of the collection of Will Fisher, founder of Jamb, the antique shop in Pimlico that specialises in fireplaces. Estimated between £400 and £800 each, they sold for £15,000 and £20,000 each, leaving even Christie’s experts bemused.

Two watercolours of interiors decorated with antique tapestries were discovered recently at an auction in Cumbria, where neither the artist nor the location had been identified. The experienced art dealer, Charles Nugent, formerly a watercolour expert at Christie’s and then curator at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, spotted them and identified the artist as William James Muller (1812 - 1845). By identified the location as the King Charles bedroom and the dining room of Cotehele House in Cornwall. Nugent presented them at the Watercolours and Works On Paper Fair held at the Science Museum last week and sold them for £4,000 each.

The self-styled “art monger”, Julian Hartnoll, who has assisted clients from the heiress Isobel Goldsmith, to advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi, is to sell more than 350 works from his stock at auction to mark his 50th year as an art dealer. Works by Victorian artist George Frederic Watts and old master drawings forger Eric Hebborn jostle with paintings and drawings by the kitchen sink maestro John Bratby and the Indian modernist Francis Newton Souza. The collection goes on view in London this Sunday and Monday at Gallery 8, Duke Street St James’s before it goes to Holloway’s Auctioneers in Banbury to be sold.