Countess Mountbatten of Burma went through the roof at Sotheby's last month. A group of 13 Tudor and Elizabethan portraits of named sitters from her husband, John Knatchbull, 7th Lord Brabourne's side of the family, were estimated at about £80,000 and sold for £650,000.
Outstanding was a portrait of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, by a follower of Hans Holbein the Younger, estimated at £2,000, which sold for £189,000.Dealers said the discrepancy between estimates and price was not because the works had been poorly attributed or undervalued - the sitters were all correctly identified, and estimates were set attractively low to encourage bidding.
Read more on telegraph.co.uk