A single owner collection of more than 200 Chinese snuff bottles and a private South Australian collection of Chinese scrolls head Gibson’s forthcoming Estate & Collector auction from 10.30am Sunday October 14 at Level 1, 885-889 High Street, Armadale.

Many of the snuff bottles are painted on the inside of the glass – a fine decoration such as that featured in lot 92, a work of art ‘The Lan Ting Shu’ dated Beijing 1898 and Wuxian 1901 and attributed to Ding Erzhong – or are of an unusual shape such as lot 50, a 1974 sponge coral ‘iron tree’ example.

Australian Rules football champion John Coleman’s Essendon match jumper he wore in 1953 is one of the major highlights of Leonard Joel’s collectables auction from 2pm Thursday September 27 at 333 Malvern Road, South Yarra.

Coleman (1928-1973) was a Victorian Football League (now the Australian Football League) star full-forward, kicking 537 goals in only 98 matches.

Known for his high-flying spectacular marks, Coleman won two premierships with Essendon (1949 and 1950) and was VFL leading goal kicker five times (1949-1953).

As a boy in the 1950s on the family property in the southern Mallee region of Victoria, Daryl Blythman became fascinated with Australian indigenous artefacts that predated European migration by thousands of years.

“My passion for collecting began thanks to my father who collected stone artefacts and axes that dated back to the Aboriginal tribes who lived or travelled through this area,” he said.

“It wasn’t long before this hobby became mine and ultimately my obsession, when I recognised that these items revealed a story that was unique to Australia.

Two works by iconic Spanish-French artist Pablo Picasso should boost auction goer numbers to Leonard Joel’s Specialist Prints auction from 6.30pm Wednesday September 19 at 333 Malvern Road, South Yarra.

The first of these is the famous Peintre Neo-Classique dans son Atelier (Neo-Classical Painter in his Studio).

One of the 20^th century’s most influential artists, Picasso etched the work in 1963 at Mas Notre Dame de View, a house in Mougins in the south of France where he and his wife Jacqueline moved to in June 1961 when the artist was 80 years old.