My choice would have been a superb cartel (bracket clock), complete with its console, from the late Louis XIV period, which came after the cast-brass bird and cost €5,295 ($7,700). Even after adding a maximum of €1,000 for much-needed cleaning and sprucing up, the piece would still be the bargain of the day.

That same afternoon a few outstanding drawings in a minor key could be bought in another room, where Claude Aguttes was holding an equally diversified auction. A newly discovered preparatory study in black and red chalks for a figure appearing in Gaetano Gandolfi’s Andromache Mourning Hector drawn between 1797 and 1799, climbed to €39,654 ($56,700), triple the high estimate. Later in the sale, the appearance of two unrecorded large gouaches signed by Pierre Mongin in 1795 caused a small sensation. Ravishing in their dainty hues, the gouaches show the famous sculptural groups carved out of marble that once flanked the entrance to the Tuileries gardens on the Place de la Concorde. The pair was originally commissioned by Gérard Coustou in 1739 for the park at Marly in the Paris region and were transferred to the Place de la Concorde the year Mongin drew them. The gouaches sold for just under €50,000 ($72,200), which was double the estimate. They are nevertheless a superb acquisition given their historical relevance to a world-famous site.

Later in the sale an admirable South German cabinet in red tortoiseshell, made in the 1720s, cost €18,588 ($26,800). Visible losses of tortoiseshell strips along the base and a section of the cornice would have turned off most bidders. Such damage can easily be repaired without leaving any visible trace. The cabinet might well reappear in some international fair at double the price.

The first auctions held at Drouot this year showed no change in these trends. In a €2.6 million ($3.4 million) sale of antiquities conducted on January 17 by Pierre Bergé & Associés the star lot was an Egyptian female bust of the 1st century B.C., which once belonged to the governor of the central bank of Romania and passed in the 1940s into the hands of his son-in-law, the Romanian-born French playwright Eugène Ionesco. The connection of the bust with the recent cultural history of France and its documented pre-1970 provenance combined to send the piece skyrocketing to €620,019 ($820,000). Another work with an impeccably documented provenance, a Paros marble of Aphrodite, carved by a Greek artist in the 1st century after a 5th-century B.C. original, fetched the same price.

Both exceeded their high estimates. In that same session, however, a superb Egyptian stone bowl dated to the 3rd millennium B.C. sold under the low estimate, for only €2,480 ($3,300). As we said above, now is the time to go art-hunting.

Souren Melikian is the International Editor of Art+Auction. "Gone (Art) Hunting" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2009 Table of Contents.