Auction | featured news

A century-old US five-cent coin - illegally cast, found in a car crash, deemed a fake and abandoned for decades - is sold for $3.1m at auction.

Vladimir Tretchikoff's original painting of the Chinese Girl, believed to be the world's most reproduced print, sells at auction for £982,050, around twice its anticipated sale price.

The violin played by the bandmaster of the Titanic as the oceanliner sank has been unearthed, a British auction house said Friday. Survivors of the Titanic have said they remember the band, led by Wallace Hartley, playing on deck even as passengers boarded lifeboats after the ship hit an iceberg.

Six-figure bids are expected when a rare 148-year-old baseball card discovered at a rural Maine yard sale is auctioned. Saco River Auction Co. in Biddeford is holding an auction Wednesday evening that includes a card depicting the Brooklyn Atlantics amateur baseball club. The card isn't the same as a modern-day baseball card, which became common in the 1880s. Rather, it's an original photograph from 1865 mounted on a card, showing nine players and a manager.

EBay Inc reported holiday quarter results that just beat Wall Street expectations, but the e-commerce company also gave a cautious forecast for 2013. EBay shares climbed 1.7 percent to $53.80 in after-hours trading following the announcement. Expectations were high ahead of the results because sales data from outside sources suggested strong sales growth from eBay's online marketplace and a solid increase in transactions processed by the company's PayPal payments business.

A Brazilian high school student says she is auctioning off her virginity to help her ailing mother. But she rejected an offer to pay for her mother's medical expenses if she stopped the auction.

Christie's auctioned off the Archduke Joseph Diamond for nearly $21.5 million Tuesday night, a world auction record price per carat for a colorless diamond. The Archduke Joseph Diamond was the first of two out-of-this world diamonds being auctioned off this week in Geneva. Sotheby's on Wednesday will auction what it calls an exceptionally rare fancy deep blue briolette diamond of 10.48 carats expected to get up to $4.5 million.

Going once, going twice ... sold for $43 million. Wednesday night in New York City, Christie's auctioned off Claude Monet's "Nympheas" and two other paintings inherited by the Hackley School for a combined total of more than $50 million.

A 1932 portrait by Pablo Picasso of his young lover and a pioneering 3-D Andy Warhol painting of the Statue of Liberty are expected to sell for at least $35 million each, but could fetch much more when they are auctioned next month.

The lore of the landscape was as irresistible to its owner as its beautiful brush strokes: Renoir had painted it, Baltimore collector Saidie May said, for his mistress on a linen napkin at a Paris restaurant along the Seine.