Market news: Bonhams are surprised by two Islamic art sales London's White Cube gallery opens the first exhibition in Britain for one of America's hottest young artists, Ethiopian-born Julie Mehretu, this evening. Sotheby's sold one of her classic, swirling abstract paintings in Doha last week for a record $3 million. Mehretu's prices have been creeping up since they first hit the auction block 10 years ago, becoming the subject of competition and squabbles among collectors. They reached $1 million in 2010 with a painting from the Lehman Brothers corporate collection. In New York, her dealer, Marian Goodman, opens a show of new work on May 11 to coincide with contemporary art sales there. London's Islamic art sales, a hotchpotch of 7th-to-19th-century works of art from the Middle East, Turkey and India, have not yet recovered their sheen of just a few years ago.Sotheby's and Christie's sales last week both fell far short of estimates. Only Bonhams achieved its target, with two results that surprised even its specialists. A pair of decorated Iznik water bottles, owned for 100 years by the Cunliffe-Copeland family at Trelissick House in Cornwall, were estimated at £110,000 but sold for £757,500. Estimates were even further out for a 1,000-year-old, semi-circular, carved stone temple step (pictured) from Sri Lanka. Weighing three quarters of a ton, it was discovered in a garden in Devon, and was estimated at £20,000, but sold for £553,250. Highest price of the week was a record £2.2 million obtained in a sale of 19th-century Orientalist paintings at Sotheby's. This was for a painting by Ludwig Deutsch of an elder, soldier and servant bearing gifts at the entrance of an Eastern palace. The Orientalist sale doubled estimates to reach £6.3 million. A 15th-century Jewish manuscript known as The Mishneh Torah was withdrawn from an auction in New York yesterday after it was bought privately through Sotheby's by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The manuscript, to have been the star lot of the sale of the Michael and Judy Steinhardt collection of Judaica, was estimated at between £4.5 million and £6 million and, although its price was not disclosed, Sotheby's confirmed it was above the previous Judaica record, of $2.9 million for a Hebrew bible. The price of gold may have tumbled, but that has not prevented the contemporary decorative arts dealer Adrian Sassoon from presenting an exhibition of richly crafted objects by Italian goldsmith Giovanni Corvaja, in the context of an exhibition of 14th- and 15th-century Italian gold-ground paintings at Moretti Fine Art, London, from Thursday. Prices for the gold jewellery start at £15,500. The paintings are all in six figures.