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Christie's main evening sale certainly bore the signs of supply shortage, with 52 works estimated to fetch £30 million. Of these, 20 per cent were estimated below £100,000, which is usually the domain of the lower-value day sale.

The biggest chunk of that estimate was a large Jan Steen interior from the collection of the Earls of Lonsdale, which was estimated to fetch more than £7 million. However, even though a smaller Steen painting has sold to the Rijksmuseum in Holland for more, the asking price was still considered too high, and it was unsold. The other major lot was a view of the Molo in Venice by Canaletto with a £4 million estimate. With the help of unexpected bidding from Asia, it sold for £8.5 million. Bidding in the room was Adar Poonawalla, whose father, Cyrus, the Indian biotech billionaire, I spotted buying at the Impressionist sales. Last week, his son added a Titian portrait to their collection for £782,000, beating off Russian competition on the telephone.

Paintings of great quality that had not been on the market recently did well. Abel Grimmer's depiction of The Tower of Babel, which had not been on the market for 200 years, was pursued by a Russian bidder until it sold for a record £980,000. A biblical scene, signed Gerard Dou, was in fact by the little known Willem de Poorter, and sold to London dealer, Johnny van Haeften, for a triple-estimate £218,000.

There were strong prices for British portraits of elegant ladies by Lawrence and Romney, but a pair of landscapes by Joseph Wright of Derby were not sold. They had been on the market six years ago, and, while such a turnaround is common with contemporary art, with Old Masters something has to be off the market for at least one generation to be considered fresh and therefore more desirable.

But it was at Sotheby's that the full strength of Russian bidding came into play, accounting for 30 per cent of lots in the main evening sale. Among these was the top lot, a vividly Expressionist St Dominic in Prayer by El Greco, which sold for a record £9.2 million. The same Russian bidder also claimed a crucifixion scene by El Greco for £3.4 million. Although Sotheby's did not identify exactly which lots were bought by Russians, it would seem that the list was fairly eclectic and would include a 15th-century Madonna and Child by Francesco Botticini, two paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder, and an 18th-century Venetian canal scene by Marieschi. The number of Russian-speaking telephone bidders was also overwhelming – so much so that the auctioneer, Henry Wyndham, christened one Olga, which was not her real name.

Sotheby's co-chairman of Old Masters, Alex Bell, said afterwards that he thought the market had entered a new phase with this sale. Doing their homework over the weekend, Sotheby's now estimates that in the past month, during which time they have taken nearly 290 million pounds in London, bidders from 75 different countries have registered with them. One in 6 were from Asia, Russia or the Middle East, and a similar percentage were bidding at Sotheby's for the first time.