Museum acquisitions

THE National Maritime Museum has purchased two prints from a London dealer following its appeal in the Antiques Trade Gazette for information about two missing William Hodges paintings.

THE Fan Museum in Greenwich, the world’s only museum entirely dedicated to the history of fans and the craft of fan-making, have acquired an important fan painted around 1889 by Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942).

THE widow of Baron Heini von Thyssen, the billionaire art collector, has loaned a huge new collection to the museum he founded in Madrid, the Thyssen Bornemisza.

ALEXANDER Walker, who died last year at the age of 73, was the film critic of London’s Evening Standard for more than 40 years and among the well-known names in the film world. Not so well known is that he was a noted collector of modern art.

TOWARDS the end of March it was reported that The British Museum and the V&A had joined forces for the first time to acquire a rare Indian 7th century metal statue of a standing figure of the Buddha Sakyamuni, the first to enter a public European collection. After a tour of provincial museums it will be shown alternatively at the two institutions.

THE Royal Museum & Art Gallery of Canterbury have acquired a van Dyck portrait of one of the city’s most famous sons from one of London’s leading Old Master picture dealers.

THE architect of the newly built British Library is to donate 600 art works collected over 50 years to the nation. Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson will hand over the gift to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester via the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund), the UK’s leading independent art charity.

Funded by the Friends of the British Museum, the Caryatid Fund and the National Art Collections Fund, the British Museum has acquired an extremely rare Roman fluorspar cup from the 1st century AD. The total cost of the antiquity, bought from a leading London dealer, was £150,000.

A grant of £25,095 from the National Art Collections Fund has helped the British Library acquire an album of evocative memories of 19th-century Delhi – Reminiscences of Imperial Delhi.

THE Burlington Magazine have extra reason to celebrate their centenary this month as they unveil the rediscovery of a lost work by Benvenuto Cellini. The 19in (48cm) bronze statuette of a satyr has been identified during the preparation of a catalogue raisonné of sculpture in the Royal Collection.

Solutions should cause ‘least distortion’ to the art market: THE Government have launched the review – announced in this year’s Budget – into how they can improve on the current hand-to-mouth system of saving art for the nation.

The Imperial War Museum and Manchester Metropolitan University are to carry out a three-year project to catalogue, digitally photograph and publish online 10,000 posters from the museum’s collection.

IT’S not often that Britain recovers a highly important work from the United States – most of the traffic is usually the other way. However, Norfolk Museums Service are celebrating silver dealer Christopher Hartop’s triumph in negotiating the return of Sir Robert Walpole’s sterling silver tureen, which has now been put on show in the silver gallery at Norwich Castle.

A rare discovery of two completely unknown paintings by Goya has aroused considerable interest in Madrid. Discovered during a visit to a family in Madrid, the two paintings of Tobias and the Angel and The Holy Family were identified by the picture expert of Alcalá Subastas, Richard de Willermin.

THE Tate Gallery has launched a campaign to raise £12.5m to acquire Sir Joshua Reynolds’ celebrated portrait of Omai, the South Sea Islander who took London Society by storm in the 18th century.

Pick of the Bligh relics sold at Christies King Street last month was the cup that he used to hold his meagre rations of bread and water, a coconut shell that bears his incised initials, the date April 1789 and, inscribed in ink around the rim, the words “The Cup I eat my miserable allowance of”.

THE acquisition of a unique collection of Afghan textiles has highlighted the cash crisis at the British Museum. Despite spending £34,000 on the collection, including a £26,000 grant from the National Arts Collection Fund, the BM’s ethnographic textiles collection has nowhere to display it.

JUST as the world’s top golfers were teeing off for The Open at Muirfield last week, Scotland was celebrating another hole in one. Grants totalling more than £2m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Arts Collection Fund, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, St Andrews and private benefactors meant that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery could acquire the nation’s most important golfing painting, Charles Lees’ (1800-1880) oil on canvas, The Golfers (1847).

THE National Library of Ireland has acquired a sprawling collection of manuscripts by James Joyce, which remained hidden for nearly 60 years after being concealed from the Nazis.They include a total of some 700 pages in six notebooks, 16 drafts from Ulysses and typescripts and proofs of Finnegans Wake.

THE Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has just acquired an important oil sketch by Sir Peter Paul Rubens thanks to grants from the National Arts Collection Fund and the Resource V&A Purchase Fund.