Market news: Roger Hilton's child-like drawings, 'stuckist' paintings and Edward Seago

Colin Gleadell rounds up all the latest news from the fine art and antiques market

Arts sales: trekkies breach the final frontier

Child-like drawings made by an artist while he was bed-ridden from alcoholism have been selling like hot cakes. The artist, Roger Hilton, who died in 1975, is rated as one of the stars of the St Ives group of painters, who explored abstraction in the 1950s. Some of them, including Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and William Scott, now command six-figure prices.

Hilton has yet to follow suit, but on Saturday an exhibition of his work opens at Tate St Ives, and his drawings from bed take pride of place. As a forerunner to the Tate show, the Jonathan Clark Gallery in Chelsea has mounted an exhibition of these works from the artist's estate. Priced between £5,000 and £15,000, most were sold within days of the opening.

• Advance publicity for the first "stuckists" exhibition in central London has resulted in multiple sales for some of the group's main protagonists.

  The "stuckists" derive their name from Tracey Emin's comment that they were "stuck, stuck, stuck" (in the past). But the group is probably best known for the campaign it, and especially its leader, Charles Thomson, has waged against the Tate. It complains about the Turner Prize, the bias towards conceptual art, and about the habit of buying art by serving trustees.

  The Stuckists' exhibition, which opens at Spectrum in Great Titchfield Street on Friday, therefore raises the question "how good are they at painting?"

  Whatever the critics may say, buyers from the UK, the US and Japan have already taken a punt. Six of Thomson's paintings have sold for between £4,000 and £5,000 each. Joe Machine, a former jailbird who paints for therapeutic reasons, has also sold six paintings for the same price.

  Still available is former punk rocker Paul Harvey's portrait of Nigella Lawson at £2,500 and Thomson's irreverent painting of the Tate director, Nick Serota Making an Acquisition (or not, in this case), at £30,000.

• London dealer Jeremy Taylor says he has just had the best week in 20 years in the art business. Far from selling the latest fad in contemporary art, he has mounted an exhibition of 45 paintings by one of the Royal Family's favourite artists in the 1950s and '60s, Edward Seago, at Colnaghi's in Old Bond Street.

  Seago, a latter-day Impressionist, is not represented in our national museum collections, "but artists and Middle England love him", says Taylor, who has already sold one-third of the show, at prices of up to £90,000 per canvas.

• Tate's decision to announce the prices it has paid for its latest acquisitions serves to highlight the problems it faces when competing in the market, particularly in the salerooms. Its most expensive purchase, Joshua Reynolds's The Archers, bought from the Australian collector John Schaeffer for £3.2 million, was sold for half that price at Christie's five years ago.

  Portrait of Henrietta and Mary Hyde by the 17th-century painter, Willem Wissing, was bought from London dealer Richard Green for £200,000. This had been available last October at Sotheby's, where it fetched nearly £100,000 less.