Bonhams South African art sale in London made 3.1m this week led by a new looking for international attention:

A work titled ‘Red Jacket’, an image by Vladimir Griegorovich Tretchikoff (1913-2006) of his muse and one-time lover in Java, made a world record price of £337,250 (R4.7m) at Bonhams, the international auction house, in London yesterday (17.10.12). Before the sale, the painting had been estimated to sell for £50,000 to £80,000.

Top price in the sale was a majestic landscape by Jacob Hendrik Pierneef (1886-1957), titled ‘Kransberg, Rustenberg, Transvaal’, which sold for £361,250 (R5m). A pair of sunlit mountain and farm images, titled ‘Cape Farmlands’, made a new world record for a Pierneef work on paper (smashing the previous record, also set at Bonhams in 2008, five times over). The pair, estimated to sell for £70,000 to £100,000, was knocked down for £289,250 (4m).

The third world record in this sale was for a work titled ‘The Garden of Eden’ by Stanley F. Pinker (1924-2012), which had been estimated to sell for £70,000 to £100,000 but sold for £337,250 (R4.7m).

‘The newly weds’, an intimate scene by self-taught artist Gladys Mgudlandlu (1917-1979), also set a new world record for the artist at £27,500 (R384,000).