London Art Week announces a series of Salons for Winter 2018, combining special selling exhibitions and auctions with one-off events, discussions and talks that will explore 5,000 years of fine art. Running from Thursday, 29 November to Friday, 7 December, there is a late night on Monday 3 December and a number of galleries will open the weekend of 1 and 2 December. Opening times for LAW Winter 2018 vary, full details will be on the website.

LAW Winter 2018 Salons invite new audiences to connect with pre-contemporary art, and provide a platform for eminent UK and international art dealers and auction houses to engage with curators, connoisseurs and collectors. The salons will be held at public and private locations across Mayfair and St. James's, the celebrated heartland of London's gallery scene for over 200 years and home to many of the world's greatest art dealerships.

EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONSCallisto Fine Arts will discuss an extremely rare marble portrait bust of Mary Shelley by Camillo Pistrucci (1811-1854) in this 200th year since Frankenstein, her masterpiece, was published. Callisto Fine Arts will create an evening event to celebrate one of the world's most famous women writers and her enduring work.

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art will hold a talk on the rise of commercial illustration and the genesis of advertising. The gallery's LAW Winter exhibition is The Influencing Image: A Century of Commercial Illustration and Design, showing works that span 100 years from around 1880 to 1970. The gallery also hosts, with Guy Peppiatt Fine Art, a Christmas Exhibition of 100 Watercolours.

The Fashionable Gentleman: a special event with Henry Poole, the eminent Savile Row tailors, at Robilant + Voena, combining a tour of the Henry Poole atelier followed by a talk about portraits and fashion at the Dover Street gallery. Antique garments will be displayed illustrating the artistry of Savile Row's finest sartorial style.

Martyn Gregory will reveal, in a talk and exhibition, the remarkable travels and artistic success of Hilda May Gordon (1874-1982), who set off one day on a four-month holiday to paint the Dalmation coast. She didn't return home for more than six and a half years, having inadvertently circumnavigated the globe, solo, supported entirely by funds from selling her paintings. In 1928 Hilda explained: “I lingered wherever I saw something I wanted to paint and whenever I had accumulated a fair sized collection, I made for the nearest big city and had an exhibition. In this way, all around the world, I painted scenes and natives on the spot, and by selling my work paid for my expenses and had something to invest as well'. This year marks the 90th anniversary of the culmination in New York of her round-the-world tour.

A significant private collection of Oceanic and African indigenous art works will be offered by Forge & Lynch Ltd, featuring fine sculptural pieces such as a Tongan headrest, a mother-of-pearl inlaid Cook Island bowl and a ceremonial cava bowl from Fiji. The renowned tribal art collections of General Augustus Pitt-Rivers (1827-1900), James Hooper (1897-1971) and Kenneth Webster (1906-1967) are represented.

Sam Fogg will present an exhibition of seven objects over seven days, starting with a single piece and evolving over the course of the week with a new work of art added to the display each day. A fifteen minute daily lunchtime talk will focus on each new object in turn. All seven objects, together encompassing the genres of metalwork, sculpture, painting and stained glass, will be united by the theme of design, yet will evoke the varied and sometimes surprising nature of artistic design, and challenge the commonly held belief that the art of the Middle Ages was governed only by convention and tradition.

Further exhibitions and events will focus on Art Nouveau ceramics (Raccanello Leprince) and changing views of Venice (Charles Beddington Ltd). Details will be announced soon.

HIGHLIGHT WORKS

At Lullo Pampoulides - a beautiful Holy Family circa 1770 by Gaetano Gandolfi (1734-1802).  A skilled draughtsman, sculptor, etcher and one of the most acclaimed painters of 18th century Bologna, between the 1760s and 1780s the artist's free and accomplished style took inspiration both from the Venetian and Emilian figurative traditions to reveal an extremely complex and sophisticated use of light and colour.

At Brun Fine Art – an important and large glazed polychrome terracotta by Giovanni della Robbia (1469–1529/30), Eucharistic Tabernacle with Jesus as a Child blessing Angels and Cherubs.

At Charles Beddington – an exuberant depiction of revellers in Venice: The Piazza San Marco during Carnival by Moonlight, dated 1878, by Leone Colle (active in Venice in the 1870s), shortly after the installation of gas lighting.

At Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd – a sensitive portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, A.R.A (1734-1797) of Old John, Head Waiter at The King's Head Inn in Derby, circa 1780.

London Art Week shines a spotlight on the finest pre-contemporary art available on the world market.  The exhibitions, events and talks will showcase objects and sculpture from ancient Greece and the Far East to European Neoclassical;  works of art from the Medieval to Modernist, and master paintings, watercolours and drawings from the 17th to 20th centuries. Popular tours around the galleries are part of the London Art Week experience.  A full programme of events, exhibitions map and opening times will be available at www.londonartweek.co.uk. There is no charge to visit the exhibitions, and most of the events and talks are free.