Oil painting

The stand-alone evening sale of 15 paintings by L.S. Lowry at Sotheby’s on March 26 raised £13m, with all bar two works getting away.

An appeal court ruling on the tax status of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ masterpiece ‘Omai’ means that a number of very rich people are likely to get a bit richer.

A rare early work by the Dutch Old Master painter Dirck Van Delen (c.1605-1671) will be offered at Halls of Shrewsbury on April 16.

EXHIBITION – In 1956, the woodsman Ted Floate met Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979) quite by chance but ended up managing the artist’s estate while also helping with framing and even giving other technical advice.

The purchase of a George Bellows painting has signalled a major change in policy at the National Gallery, ending 190 years of showing only European artists.

The fundraising campaign to buy Van Dyck’s final self-portrait for the National Portrait Gallery will continue into the summer.

The Contemporary art sales in London last week raised a hammer total of £254.6m, a record for an auction series in this category in the capital.

A single-owner collection of Modern British art will be offered at Boningtons’ sale of fine art, antiques and Asian works of art in Loughton, Essex on February 26.

Leading the latest series of Impressionist & Modern auctions in London, a textbook Cubist still life by Juan Gris (1887-1927) sold for £31m at Christie’s.

A lost portrait of Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth – thought to be the only one taken from life left in private hands – is to go on loan for display in the poet’s final home in Dumfries.

A number of oil paintings by Sir Kyffin Williams (1918-2006) gave a major fillip to Rogers Jones’ first sale in their new Cardiff saleroom. The results included the highest price ever seen for one of his works sold at auction.

UK dealers and auction houses have been alerted to the theft of six oil paintings by Evie Hone from a church in Ireland.

On the eve of the major Old Masters sales in the auction houses, Mayfair dealers Colnaghi of 15 Old Bond Street announced the sale of a recently rediscovered ‘Venus’ by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553).

This previously unrecorded late work by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97), ‘Landscape with Rainbow’, sold for £125,000 at Bellmans in Wisborough Green, West Sussex.

The Charles Le Brun oil on canvas discovered hanging in the Paris Hôtel Ritz proved to be the high point of Christie’s latest sale of Old Master and 19th century paintings in Paris.

First exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1913, this painting by Walter Langley (1852-1922) will be offered for sale at Lawrences Auctioneers of Bletchingley on March 20.

This 14½ x 12in (37 x 30in) portrait which will be offered at Dickins Auctioneers in Middle Claydon, Buckingham, on March 1-2 has been dated to c.1513 after the auctioneers carried out an X-ray test on the oak panel.

Andrew Smith & Son’s January 29 sale in Winchester includes this winter landscape by Frederick Marinus Kruseman (1816-82).

Fellows of Birmingham will include paintings from the studio of portraitist Howard James Morgan (b.1949) in their next sale on December 11.

‘Peculiar’ and ‘eerie’ seem the best words to describe the works of Algernon Newton (1880-1968).