More than 10,000 guests attended the opening last week of Tefaf, The European Fine Art Fair, in Maastricht – considered the world’s most prestigious fair and covering everything from antiquities and Old Masters to Modern and Contemporary art. Museum directors were out in force. Benno Tempel of the Hague’s Gemeentemuseum, for instance, bought a view of Lausanne by Dutch painter Matthijs Maris.

“Nobody knew where this picture was,” said Tempel, capturing the sense of discovery that permeates the fair, “and I found it here at Tefaf.” Old Master paintings are the fair’s main strength, and here Richard Green from London achieved the top early sale to a private collector, with Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s brilliant satire, The Peasant  Lawyer, whose subject is shown knee-deep in lucrative documents before a queue of peasants bearing gifts, which had an asking price of £2.75 million.

The painting is one of 25 of the subject painted by the artist, and this was one was the earliest, dated 1615, the year before he changed the spelling of his name to Breughel, to differentiate himself from his father. Close behind were a 1638 still life by Pieter Claesz, discovered in a French private collection by Paris dealer Bob Haboldt, priced at £2.3 million, and biblical scene The Supper at Emmaus by the Italian Baroque painter Bernardo Strozzi, priced at £2.1 million by New York dealer Otto Naumann, who bought it for less than half that price last year at Christie’s, where it was covered in centuries of dirt and grime. “The market is very strong for trophy paintings – the best examples by well known hands,” commented Jonathan Green, who sold the Brueghel.

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Art Dubai, the contemporary art fair founded in 2007 by British dealers seeking to export Western Art to the Middle East, opens on Wednesday with a change of emphasis. In 2010, the fair was rebranded under the guidance of arts journalist Antonia Carver, who directed it more towards the art of the Menasa (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) region. Now it has followed a trend set by many a contemporary art fair by opening a section devoted to earlier, Modern art (again from the Menasa region). This section involves uncharted territory, not least the exhibition for Rasheed Araeen by London’s Grosvenor Gallery. Born in Pakistan in 1935, Araeen moved to London in the Sixties and became involved in radical political activity such as the Black Panther Movement. Untrained as an artist, his writings railed against the treatment of Third World artists by the West.

Although Araeen’s work is in museums, galleries in London never found it easy to sell. At Art Dubai it will be priced from £12,000 to £90,000 for the painted wooden construction One Summer Afternoon, of 1968.