Fine Art

FRANCE: REMBRANDT Bugatti, the sculptor brother from the famous racing car family, has been a major saleroom force for some years and there is no stopping him at the moment to judge by recent sales in Paris.

UK: PAUL Henry’s A Village in Connemara which sold for £58,000 at Edgar Horns in Eastbourne on July 12. The 16 x 24in (41 x 61cm) oil on canvas is fully signed and still bears an original paper label on the stretcher with title and artist, though the frame is a replacement.

THE second week of London’s prestige midsummer sales saw the Modern given way to the traditional with a flurry of exceptional prices for Old Master paintings and drawings and Renaissance works of art.

ITALIAN Renaissance sculpture made a rare splash in the national news last week with the announcement that a £3500 bronze bought in Los Angeles by leading London works of art dealer Daniel Katz was now identified as a “multimillion pound masterpiece by Donatello”.

THOUGH it might no longer be the place where an international vendor would choose to sell a £20m Picasso or Van Gogh, London last week enhanced its reputation as a revenue for selling major-name Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art with a string of major results at Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales.

UK: AGNEW’S have strengthened their commitment to contemporary art with the appointment of Mark Adams as director in charge of the contemporary department.

UK: OVER half the images in the Craven collection of photographs offered by Bearne’s in Exeter on May 6 were by William, 2nd Earl of Craven.

US: A concerted push into the market by Phillips meant that there were three major players on the Impressionst and Modern auction scene in New York last week.

UK: THE first week of May saw a rash of specialist photograph, auctions break out in England but the cream of the crop was a single-owner sale of vintage photographs collected by William, 2nd Earl of Craven (1809-1866), at Bearne’s in Exeter on May 6.

UK: THIS bronze, Theseus Slaying the Minotaur, stamped Barye 1, made £105,000 at Sotheby’s on April 19.

US & FRANCE: TWO works by Philippe de Champaigne have been withdrawn from the sale of the Karl Lagerfeld collection, in New York on May 23, and offered to the French State.

UK: LEADING London art dealer Simon Dickinson has announced the sale to the Brooklyn Museum of Art of the 14th century Florentine gold ground painting of Christ in Majesty which he bought for £66,000 at Dorchester rooms of Hy. Duke & Son on March 9

US: NEW York financier Saul Steinberg is to sell his collection of 61 Old Master paintings through the New York art dealer Richard Feigen. With obvious carrots dangled by the leading auction houses for such an important collection, conservatively valued at some $52m, this is a major fillip for the fine art trade.

UK & US: PHILLIPS’ traditional reputation as the permanent poor relation of Sotheby’s and Christie’s at the top end of the international art market could be turned on its head by a clutch of high value consignments soon to be offered in London and New York.

UK: Christie’s are to sell a selection of works of art from the Wernher Collection, expected to fetch over £10m, as the highlight of their summer season.

UK: FEW silhouettes are as desirable as those portraits of military officers produced by John Buncombe, and few of those are as valuable as the example illustrated here, which was the highlight of a residual 17-lot group of silhouettes from the Christie Collection, consigned to Christie’s (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) South Kensington sale on March 14.

UK: A Shining Palace, a 2ft 1/4in by 20in (62 x 51cm) oil on canvas view of Venice, signed by William John Leech (1881-1968) had been consigned to a sale conducted by Mainstreet Auctions in the village of Saint Boswells on March 4, 2000 where it was spotted by a runner from the south east of England.

UK: POLICE investigating the theft of 70 works of art – including several Lowrys – from a private collector in Northamptonshire in January have arrested a total of three men.

UK: ONE of the most important drawings to appear at auction in London will be put up for sale at Christie's on July 4.

UK: HAVING ascribed it to the Italian School of the 13th/14th century in their auction advertisement, Hy. Duke now believe that this 73/4 x 9in (20 x 23cm) oil on panel, right, is in fact the pinnacle – missing for 150 years – of the Madonna panel by Nardo Di Cione (1343-1366).