Christie’s no. 212

The restless generation: the photographers who grappled with Japan’s post-war legacy



Artemisia Gentileschi and the theatre of revenge — the harrowing truth behind her art



Three recently discovered portraits by the French artist who taught Louis XIII to draw



From Royal and Tribal to Village and Town: a guide to Oriental rugs and carpets



California drinkin’ — the West Coast wines every serious collector wants in their cellar



What this ‘grand tradition’ interior designer would take home from our Collector sale


More stories

Editor’s picks





Jane Avril was a dancer at the Moulin Rouge whose unique style was likened to an ‘orchid in a frenzy’. It earned her the nickname La Mélinite, which was a type of explosive. Her friend Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created many famous images of her, including this lithograph from 1899, two years before his death

Estimate: £40,000-60,000
18 March, London






Rameshwar Broota confronted a personal sense of despair through humour and satire. In his own words, The Trial (1978) ‘depicts a poor person who is trained like an athlete performing tricks, but there is nobody to see him... That is how artists keep performing... they don’t get any recognition’

Estimate: $100,000-150,000
18 March, New York






The critic Richard Bartholomew described Indian modernist V.S. Gaitonde (1924-2001) as ‘a quiet man and a painter of the quiet reaches of the imagination’. Untitled was executed in 1983, and is a brilliant example of the artist’s precise handling of light, shadow, form and space

Estimate: $2,000,000-3,000,000
18 March, New York






Winston Churchill is said to have been an aficionado of Dunhill’s aquarium lighters. Each and every one of them was uniquely hand-made, carved (using dental tools), painted and assembled by one man — Ben Shillingford. No one could match Shillingford’s artistry, and production ceased when he retired at the end of the 1950s

Estimate: £3,000-5,000
19 March, London






François Boucher used his Study of Crocodile among Reeds for his 1739 work Crocodile Hunt, one of a series of nine exotic hunt scenes commissioned from various artists by Louis XV for Versailles. The paintings, also featuring leopard, bear, tiger and ostrich, now hang in the Museum of Picardy in Amiens

Estimate: €10,000-15,000