Museums and Institutions

A LOOPHOLE in the export law has forced the British Museum to pay almost £100,000 more than the original auction price for the most expensive British coin ever sold. The museum believes the case highlights the need for Britain’s laws on exporting art to be reconsidered.

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

Next month the Royal Observatory, Greenwich will unveil four new galleries designed to tell the story of precision timekeeping.

A funding package worth £7m has been agreed allowing construction to begin on a new Wedgwood Museum in the heart of the Potteries at the company’s Barlaston headquarters.

There will be a rare chance to glimpse some of the long unseen areas of Beijing’s Forbidden City on November 28, when Henry Tzu Ng of the World Monuments Fund will deliver a lecture at the Royal Academy in conjunction with their forthcoming exhibition – China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795.

With perfect timing in advance of the forthcoming biopic starring Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter, the lecture at this year’s AGM of the British Antique Furniture Restorer’s Association was entitled Beatrix Potter – A Pioneer in Regional Furniture Discovery.

LAPADA will launch a new London flagship fair next year when LAPADA@TheRoyalAcademy opens from May 4 to 7 at the Royal Academy.

LAW Fine Art could hardly have timed their latest sale better: a collection of Cotswolds Arts and Crafts with primary provenance by leading practitioners Barnsley, Gimson and Lethaby to be sold on April 5.

Running alongside the Italian Renaissance Galleries in the V&A are the museum’s three original refreshment rooms dating from the 1860s.

FAMOUS West End department store Heal’s is the sponsor of the V&A’s major spring exhibition, International Arts and Crafts, which will be held at the museum in South Kensington from March 17 to 24.

THE memory of a long-ago, short-lived trade agreement between England and France was rekindled by an extraordinary embroidered waistcoat that surfaced in the Deburaux & Associés sale in Paris on February 11, when it sold to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for €5000 (£3470) plus 20.33% buyer’s premium.

Franz Xavier Messerschmidt (1736-83) was one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Western art.

The £1.7m price tag needed to keep the Macclesfield Psalter in the UK has been found.

FOR its seventh London staging, The Watercolours and Drawings Fair leaves its long-time home at the Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly, and moves deeper into Mayfair to The Royal Academy, 6 Burlington Gardens, W1 where it will run from February 3 to 6 with a charity preview on the evening of February 2.

The Victoria and Albert Museum will open a new Portrait Miniatures Gallery on March 2.

THE V&A has appealed for help from the art and antiques world in tracing the eight bronze plaques thought to be worth a total of £450,000 stolen in the third raid on the museum in three months.

LAUNCHED with a deal of success last year, when it attracted 10,000 visitors, COLLECT 2005 will be held at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum from January 12 to 17.

The Victoria and Albert Museum have updated security following a second theft from their Ceramic Galleries in as many months. While the new systems were installed, the galleries were closed for a week.

A LEADING figure in the world of heritage is calling for a change in the export licence rules – after the decision to keep a valuable work of art in the UK.

THE Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a devotional panel of the Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278; died 1319) from the Stoclet family in Brussels.