Fine Art

The Victoria & Albert Museum’s sculpture collection will be redisplayed this spring in the new Dorothy and Michael Hintze Galleries.

THE Art Loss Register has announced the recovery of four valuable paintings stolen 27 years ago in a £30m theft.

Establishing a new landmark for a picture lot sold at auction outside London, two portraits by Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805) took £900,000 at Dreweatt Neate’s Donnington Priory salerooms last week.

On a cold January 26 night in Edinburgh, a packed saleroom at Lyon & Turnbull witnessed a defining moment in the Scottish art market.

Christie’s will test the potentially lucrative waters of the Middle Eastern market in situ by holding an inaugural sale in Dubai this spring.

ST James’s gallery Frost and Reed, founded in 1808, have undergone a management shake-up and will have an increased focus on Contemporary art.

INTERNATIONAL exhibition and publishing company dmg world media have acquired Chicago-based Expressions of Culture Inc., producers of SOFA Chicago and SOFA New York.

Christie’s return higher total for a single sale, but Sotheby’s secure top price of series

Dreweatt Neate Fine Art have arranged a major private treaty sale to the National Library of Australia, on behalf of a prominent UK family, of a historically important folio of watercolours.

When Alex Butcher’s eye was drawn to this painting, right, he did not realise that part of the attraction might have been its familiarity.

Long before J.R.R. Tolkien settled down to write The Hobbit, he had acquired a postcard reproduction of the ink, watercolour and gouache painting Der Berggeist (The Mountain Spirit).

DOUBTLESS unique, but in its way typical of the sort of success enjoyed at Robert Finan’s sale, was this Russian 18th century emerald, ruby and diamond cross, right, mounted in silver and gold.

LIKE so much material where the name is so much part of the game, the exquisite objets d’art fashioned in the Russian workshops of Carl Fabergé have attracted copyists, repro-producers and outright forgers.

English folk art with an American accent. Not only did the pair of child portraits seen at the Athenaeum in Bury St Edmunds on June 15 represent charming examples of early 19th century folk art, they also carried the name of an artist who would move to America shortly after they were painted.

London turned up the heat in the market for Contemporary art when both Sotheby’s and Christie’s achieved outstanding results at their June evening sales.

The rainbow plate seen above right comes from an 1814 first issue* of David Cox’s Treatise on landscape Painting and Effect in Watercolours, an oblong folio work that incorporates a hand-coloured aquatint frontispiece and 31 plates (15 coloured, 15 in sepia) as well as 24 soft ground etchings.

Bird in Space, right, an unrecorded marble version of one of Constantin Brancusi’s most celebrated and iconic subjects, was the toast of Christie’s $126.8m Impressionist and Modern art sale last week in New York.

A SNATCHED moment frozen in time thanks to the lucky presence of a camera... or was it?

THE piece with star billing at Bonhams’ April 21 Antiquities auction was the dramatic white marble group, shown here, even meriting its own separate hardback catalogue.

THE market for the paintings of Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981) continues to be on a roll, particularly up in Cumbria, where the former wife of Ben Nicholson lived in the town of Brampton, some 10 miles east of Carlisle, during the latter stages of her career after her return from Paris in 1938.