Art sales: Old Masters of vim and vigour Asian interest in Dutch Old Masters is something fairly new, and was evident in the sale of still-life paintings from the Dreesman, collection including a small panel by Balthasar van der Ast, which sold for a record £2.6 million. However, the best Dutch still life of the week - a floral masterpiece by Jan Davidsz de Heem, which had been somewhat underestimated at £1.2 million - was bagged by London dealer Richard Green for £3 million. Another seller was German pharmaceuticals magnate Diethelm Doll, who was parting with several works at the sale. A rare painting by the German Renaissance artist Hans Baldung, Virgin as Queen of Heaven, had been bought for £249,000 in 1978, when Old Masters were still more costly than Impressionist paintings and Damien Hirst was barely out of short trousers. It sold for £2.1 million. A sterner bidding war broke out over his Willem van de Velde painting, The Surrender of the Royal Prince, a depiction of the surrender of the British flagship during the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1666, for which a private Dutch collector paid a double estimate £5.3 million to take home. As ever, the sales were full of discoveries and re-attributions. A small painting on copper of Mars and Venus caught in the act by Vulcan, c 1610, by the Dutch mannerist Joachim Wtewael, had been untraced since 1836, until discovered hidden in a cabinet in a grand European house. It sold for a record £4.6 million. Overall, the Dutch schools dominated. No fewer than seven paintings by Pieter Breugel the Younger, drawn on to the market by the high prices paid recently for his work, sold for some £13 million. But what of the demand for Italian religious-subject pictures, which are thought to be out of fashion? A stylish, full-length treatment of David with the head of Goliath by the baroque painter Guido Reni, which sold for £2 million in 1985, could not muster a return for the seller. But a painting of Christ among the doctors by the lesser known Orazio Borgianni, combining the theatricality of Caravaggio and the colouring of Titian, quadrupled estimates to sell for record £3.4 million. Perhaps the Reni was ruled out because it was a late version of a painting in the Louvre. The Borgianni, on the other hand, was a rare and prime work by an artist whose work is seldom available. The Old Masters market is probably the fussiest of them all, and nearly 40 per cent of lots in these sales were unsold. But that just makes the week's total, which was comfortably within pre-sale estimates, seem all the more remarkable.