Fine Art

The Art Fund have announced the five £1m winners of Art Fund International, the scheme dedicated to building collections of international contemporary art at regional UK museums and galleries.

FOUR men have been bailed until Ferbruary 25 next year following the police investigation into the theft of five L.S. Lowry paintings.

New York Old Master dealers Salander-O’Reilly are expected to file for bankruptcy after a state judge ordered their gallery to be closed indefinitely.

Art dealer Andrew Sim has sold a watercolour by Richard Dadd (1817-1886) to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It is the first work by the enigmatic Victorian artist to enter the museum’s vast art collection.

ESTIMATED at just £1000-1500, a work catalogued as by a follower of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) has sold for £2.2m at the Gloucestershire saleroom of Moore, Allen & Innocent (15% buyer’s premium).

Whitfield Fine Art pull out as Salander-O’Reilly’s multi-million dollar legal problems escalate

FOUR men, including two lawyers, arrested in a police raid in Glasgow to recover the Leonardo da Vinci stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, have now been charged in a Scottish court.

A pair of 19th century Venetian views by Italian artist Francesco Zanin proved to be the high point of a Silver Jubilee auction held by Ewbank auctioneers of Surrey on September 20 and provided their owner, a local Dorking family, with an unexpected financial bonus when they sold for multiples of their original estimates.

The auction of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection of Russian art was dramatically cancelled the day before the sale following an offer from a Russian businessman for the entire collection.

IT was the first war painting by a Scottish artist to be exhibited in Scotland and was extensively discussed in the Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers of January 1941.

Cheshire auctioneer Sir Patrick Cheyne will sell a remarkable cache of work by the Sheffield School watercolourist George Hamilton Constantine (1878-1967) on September 7.

Following the announcement in August of a newly-discovered 1938 fairground scene by Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976) scheduled to appear at Sotheby’s on December 13, it has emerged that the scene depicted is not, in fact, Beswick Fair, near Manchester, as had been mooted.

LOUISE Walker, who has been organising antiques fairs in Harrogate for the past 27 years, will launch a contemporary art fair in the North Yorkshire town next Easter.

PHILLIPS de Pury look to have taken another step to increase their influence as a major player in London’s contemporary art market by forming a new partnership with The Saatchi Gallery.

This summer has seen a spate of sleepers awoken in provincial salerooms, but inevitably the one that grabbed the headlines in the national press was the tale of the rediscovered ‘Titian’.

When the Dorchester Fine Art saleroom Duke’s sold two rediscovered panels of Dominican saints by Fra Angelico for £1.7m, it was one of the best documented events outside the London rooms accompanied by months of pre-sale media coverage.

Demand for contemporary art reached yet another new level of intensity in London’s auction rooms last week when Christie’s and Sotheby’s both posted record totals of nearly £75m for their June evening sales of contemporary works.

In 1914, Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) was living in Cornwall and enjoying the most fertile period of her career.

THE market for early English portrait miniatures received a sizeable fillip in London last week. The auction record was broken twice within the space of 24 hours with the sale of two iconic images of major figures in British history and this was backed up by a crop of other strong prices for top flight examples from the 16th and 17th centuries.

Just a month after their most successful sale ever, thanks to the consignment of an archive of Francis Bacon’s work, Woking auctioneers Ewbank’s have won another Bacon collection.