In a rare confluence of events, two Sotheby’s auctions were abruptly canceled in response to multimillion-dollar offers from tycoons. First, on September 17, Sotheby’s said that the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection of Russian art, scheduled to be auctioned in London on September 18 and 19, had been bought in its entirety by the ferrous-metals billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who has announced his intention to bring the collection back to Russia. The total high estimate for the collection was £20 million ($40 million), and the oligarch is believed to have paid around 5 million ($10 million) above that figure to halt the auction. The collection was put together by the renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya. Among its highlights are Boris Grigoriev’s painting "The Face of Russia," Nicholas Roerich’s 1905 "The Treasure of the Angels" and porcelain from the famous Orlov service given by Catherine the Great to her lover Count Orlov.

The next day, Sotheby’s had to announce another cancellation, though not of an entire sale. Stanley Ho, a Macau-based casino owner, made a successful offer of $8.9 million to acquire a Qing-dynasty bronze horse head in advance of the October 9 auction in which was supposed to appear. The head was one of 12 representing the animals of the Chinese zodiac that once adorned a water-fountain clock in the Yuanminyuan (Imperial Summer Palace) in Beijing. All 12 were carried off as booty by French and English troops after an attack on the palace in 1860. Ho has said he intends to donate the head to a museum in China. Of the rest of the heads, four are in the Poly Museum in Beijing, two are in private collections, and five are still unaccounted for.