Museums and Institutions

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has secured an 1830 autograph miniature manuscript by a 14-year-old Charlotte Brontë (1816-55) that was auctioned at Aguttes in Paris.

Sculptures of Buddha dating from the 4th-6th centuries smuggled out of Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago have finally been returned to the country’s national museum.

London’s National Gallery is asking for the public’s help to raise the final £2m required to buy 'The Finding of Moses' by Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1639) from its owner, entrepreneur and founder of the DFS furniture retailer, Graham Kirkham.

The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth in West Yorkshire has begun a public campaign to raise the final funds needed to bid for a rare manuscript from the Brontës' childhood.

‘Conversations on collecting’ is the theme of the inaugural London Art Week symposium, running for the first time this winter.

The government is hoping to find a buyer to pay £3.5m to keep an 18th century picture by Joseph Wright of Derby in the UK.

A picture in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery has emerged as an original Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) portrait.

A group of drawings and a sketchbook compiled by an artist assigned to Napoleon’s campaigns in Prussia and Poland in 1806-7 has been secured by the Louvre at a Toulouse auction.

Fundraising led by writers’ association English PEN has helped save for the nation the judge’s annotated copy of 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover'.

A Hellenistic marble stele that was received as a wedding present in the 1950s has been returned to a museum in Germany after an investigation by antiquities dealers and an Oxford scholar.

A 26-foot long kinetic sculpture by Rowland Emett (1906-90) who designed the magical car in the eponymous 1960s film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang has been sold by Bonhams for a six-figure sum to the National Railway Museum in York.

A Bath museum hopes to acquire a rare hoard of coins found in a Chew Valley field that could be valued at £4m.

A large jade brushpot from the Qing Dynasty is expected to lead a collection of more than 300 Chinese works of art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art going under the hammer at Sotheby’s New York this September.

Jane Austen's House Museum in Hampshire successfully raised the £35,000 required to buy a fragment of a letter written by the great novelist in 1814. The rare manuscript was being sold on behalf of its private owner by London dealer Maggs.