Eye-witness Account of Commodore Perry's Expedition to Japan in 1854, a rare 50ft Japanese handscroll bought by the British Museum.

The British Museum has pipped buyers at the Haughton Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show in New York to the purchase of a rare, 50ft Japanese handscroll, writes Colin Gleadell.

A rare, 50ft Japanese handscroll that was to be shipped from London to New York for an almost certain transatlantic sale at the Haughton Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show has been bought instead by the British Museum.

The handscroll (pictured) vividly illustrates the historic visit to Japan in 1854 of US Commodore Matthew C Perry and his fleet for the signing of the Convention of Kanagawa, which opened Japan to foreign trade for the first time in two centuries. The scroll, painted by Japanese artists, records the landing of the fleet, the entertaining of Perry and his officers, their presentation of a model American railway, and the US marines’ encounters with sumo wrestlers.

The extraordinary detail of each scene reveals the Japanese curiosity in their foreign visitors. Other depictions of the expedition do exist, but this is the only one known to have been an eyewitness account. The handscroll was to have been exhibited in New York by Daniel Crouch in association with Maggs Brothers, both London rare-book dealers, with an asking price of $890,000 (£555,000), but the British Museum pounced before it left these shores.

A painting by Canaletto of the New Horse Guards Parade in St James’s, where the Trooping of the Colour is held and where London 2012’s Olympic beach volleyball arena was sited, was offered for sale at Dorotheum auctioneers in Vienna last week, but was unsold because of its condition, said dealers.

Some of the paint had sunk into the unprimed wood and had subsequently been repainted in parts by other hands, they said. A larger, related painting of the Old Horse Guards Parade by Canaletto sold to Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1992 for over £10 million, but no one was sure whether this later composition, estimated at €2 million to €3 million, would respond to cleaning and reveal the real Canaletto in all his glory.

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Bonhams claimed a number of record prices in its latest sale of South African art last week, including an astonishing £337,250 for a portrait by Vladimir Tretchikoff, best known for his popular Woolworth poster girls.

The portrait, which was estimated at £50,000, is of the artist’s lover, Lenka, whom Tretchikoff befriended when he was working in Java during the Second World War and separated from his family in South Africa. When he returned home, his wife hung the portrait above her kitchen table, and it remained in the family until now.

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American graffiti artist Shepard Fairey, who made his name as the designer of President Obama’s election campaign poster, “Hope”, and then became infamous when it was discovered he had lifted the image from the internet, sold three-quarters of his latest exhibition at the Truman Brewery in east London before it opened to the public last weekend. Over 200 works are on view priced from £1,500 to £55,000.