David Bomberg's Bomb Store, painted in 1942, topped Woolley & Wallis's single-owner sale in Salisbury on 22 October, selling for £48,080 including buyer's premium. The wartime canvas led 'Dürer to Warhol: A Private Collection', a sale that ranged across five centuries, from Renaissance prints to twentieth-century masters, and it finished well clear of the next lot in the room.

The painting dates from the middle of the Second World War, a period in which Bomberg produced some of his most intense images of Britain under attack. Bomb Store belongs to that body of work, and its result underlines the steady demand for the artist's wartime pictures among collectors of modern British art, who compete for a relatively small number of canvases from those years.

Behind the Bomberg, a pastel by the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla made £35,480, while an etching by Pablo Picasso, pulled from a cancelled plate, sold for £12,065. The Balla came from one of Futurism's founding figures, and the Picasso etching was taken from a plate the artist himself had cancelled, a detail that adds to its interest for print collectors. The three leading lots between them showed the collection's range, moving from the Italian avant-garde of the early twentieth century to Picasso's printmaking, and they accounted for the bulk of the sale's value.

For Woolley & Wallis, the outcome showed the continuing appeal of a tightly chosen private collection offered as a single group. Sales of this kind, built around one collector's eye rather than a general mixed offering, have repeatedly drawn determined bidding across periods and media, and the Salisbury result added another example, with the Bomberg setting the pace from the start.