Art Fund

The UK’s leading art charity has commissioned its first-ever work by a contemporary artist as part of a campaign to boost funding for the arts.

A TRAVELLING exhibition is to be organised for the unique Cassel silver collection thanks to major grants from the Lottery and the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund).

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 National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) has criticised the state of public collecting in the UK on the same day as announcing a £500,000 offer to help keep the Macclesfield Psalter in the UK.

THE new chairman of the National Arts Collection Fund is to stand down owing to the pressures of work.

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.

Measures would not restrict art trade: BRITAIN may soon enjoy one of the most enlightened schemes for keeping key works of art in the country, thanks to the Goodison Review, which has just been published.

A National Art Collections Fund grant of £37,500 has helped Ely’s Stained Glass Museum acquire an important early 13th century French stained glass panel of the bust of a king.

IN the week of their centenary conference to discuss the future of saving art for the nation, the National Art Collections Fund announced another success. They have awarded a grant of £108,000 to help the British Museum acquire the Guilford Puteal: Corinth’s Monument to Actium (c.25-10 BC).

THIS week sees a two-day international conference at The Savoy in London to mark the centenary of the National Art Collections Fund. Saving Art for the Nation, A Valid Approach to 21st-Century Collecting? runs on Tuesday and Wednesday, November 11 and 12, and will focus on whether it matters if works of art that were once the pride of British private collections go overseas and how they should be rescued for the nation if we believe it is important to keep them here.

IT started as a joke, but at £240,000, it is now one of the most important pieces of ceramics to change hands in recent years. One of the most extraordinary pieces of maiolica in existence, the phallic plate, pictured right, whose purchase grant of £100,000 is the highest ever given by the National Art Collections Fund for a piece of ceramics, dates to about 1536 and is attributed to Francisco Urbino, one of the leading maiolica painters of the period.

OXFORD’S Ashmolean Museum has made an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for £23m for a major redevelopment of the building. The new proposals for Europe’s oldest museum include a dedicated education centre, 100 per cent more display space and state-of-the-art environmental control.

CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown’s Budget plans to help achieve one of the three main aims of the National Art Collections Fund (the Art Fund) campaign to improve art donation. Concern that art owners do not have enough incentive to bequeath works to the nation has led the Chancellor to announce that he will look at introducing a policy of tax relief on such donations – until now, such relief has only been available on donations of cash or shares.

THE National Art Collections Fund (the Art Fund) are marking their centenary by calling for the whole process of saving art for the nation to be overhauled.

The National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund), has offered a £400,000 grant to the National Gallery in their bid to secure Raphael’s The Madonna of the Pinks for the collection. The painting, sold by the Duke of Northumberland to the Getty Museum in California, is subject to a temporary export bar of one month, with a potential further six months extension, to give the National Gallery the chance to raise the £29.5m needed to keep it in the country.

A £5600 National Art Collections Fund grant has enabled the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments at Oxford University to keep a handsome Baroque trumpet with a legend attached.

A £42,500 grant from the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund), the UK’s largest independent art charity, has helped the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside acquire an English astronomical table clock (1787) by Thomas Barry (1756-c.1820).

THE National Arts Collection Fund have announced a raft of new grants to celebrate the start of their centenary year. First up is a grant of £33,000 towards the £132,000 needed by the Glasgow Museums to acquire Harry Clarke’s stained glass window depicting the Coronation of the Virgin.

Brian Allen, Chairman Elect of the National Arts Collection Fund, has announced that they will celebrate their centenary in 2003 with a £1m purchase.