Museums and Institutions

The owner of a £5.75m John Singer Sargent oil painting has been temporarily prevented from exporting the picture by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

A total of 18 phones competed for a rare devotional painting offered by a New York institution at Freeman’s in Philadelphia this week.

Three major Old Master acquisitions by museums have been announced over the last fortnight. They include two works that headlined London’s latest auction series in this category.

The art and antiques market gets busy in March with events such as TEFAF Maastricht, the BADA 2019 fair and London’s contemporary art evening auctions, but for art and antiques fans not travelling to London or the Low Countries, there is plenty going on in northern England in the same month.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest has announced that it bought the Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) portrait of Princess Mary, daughter of Charles I, that sold for £5m at Christie’s in December.

The Louvre museum in Paris has requested the loan of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ for its major exhibition dedicated to the artist opening in October.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has been revealed as the buyer of the small Rembrandt oil painting that led Sotheby’s Old Master evening sale in London at the end of last year after it went on view at the museum in the United Arab Emirates.

'The Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881', a scene of influential Victorians at an exhibition painted by William Powell Frith (1819-1909), is on offer from St James’s dealer Martin Beisly for a price in the region of £10m.

Prof David Starkey has said the most successful art dealers, such as his friend Philip Mould, do not necessarily have the greatest knowledge of art history but rather possess 'a flair for discoveries'.

The government is proposing to strengthen the Treasure Act to include important finds that do not fit the current legal definition.

Pictures by Mod Brit artists including Barbara Hepworth and Julian Trevelyan will go under the hammer at Cambridge auction house Cheffins following a council’s decision to offload artworks from storage.

The antiques trade descended on The Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle for the opening of an exhibition celebrating dealers’ shops, tastes, practices and their role in the creation of museum collections.

The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries has acquired a rare 15th-century French Gothic coffer – one of the largest-surviving examples of a late medieval box used for transporting precious books.

A public fund-raising effort to purchase the ‘lost’ portrait of Charles Dickens for the nation from dealership Philip Mould & Company has reached £60,000, a third of the asking price.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has bought a painting by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) barely months after it fetched a major sum at a Christie’s auction.

A rare Anglo-Saxon pendant found in Norfolk by a metal detectorist has been voted Britain’s favourite work of art bought by a museum.