Editor’s picks | | | The cartoonish, colourful, naive-style paintings of Albert Willem often present scenes that are both dramatic and absurd. His 2020 work Peter Decided Not To Buy The 51,000,000.99 Dollar Car depicts a man outside a car showroom, handing back the keys to a sporty-looking vehicle he has apparently just caused to explode View Lot Estimate: £10,000-15,000 until 1 July, Online | | | | In this pietra dura plaque from the 1670s, black and coloured marble, agate, jasper and amethyst are used to create a still life of fruit and flowers in an alabaster urn. It appears to have been made at the Gobelins workshop in Paris, set up in 1662 to produce furniture and decorative arts for the sumptuous palaces of King Louis XIV View Lot Estimate: £30,000-50,000 2 July, London | | | | Jean-Léon Gérôme’s evocative oil sketch General Bonaparte at Cairo recalls Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of 1798-99. Resembling a finished work by Gérôme now at Hearst Castle in California, it was painted in the mid-1860s, when nostalgia for the late emperor was on the rise as the centenary of his birth (1869) drew near View Lot Estimate: £20,000-30,000 3 July, London | | | | John Gould was a taxidermist and curator of birds at the museum of the Zoological Society of London when he co-wrote A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, published in 1831-32. One of the society’s founders, Nicholas Aylward Vigors, provided the book’s scientific descriptions, and the illustrations were by Gould’s wife, Elizabeth View Lot Estimate: £20,000-30,000 10 July, London | | | Browse Auctions | |
