Henry VIII palace now museum piece
The 1568 watercolour (above right), Nonsuch Palace from the South, by Joris Hoefnagel, had been the subject of a temporary export ban earlier this year.
It was purchased for £1m with the National Heritage Memorial Fund contributing half this amount, the Art Fund donating £250,000, and the remaining amount from the V&A.
See story below for another recent V&A purchase, this time from a West Kensington sale.
Hyams donation of art and vintage cars
PROPERTY developer and collector Harry Hyams, who died in December 2015, has left much of his £487m estate to a charity that will preserve his collection for the nation.
The Capricorn Foundation, set up in 2010, will be responsible for the upkeep and display of works of art and vintage cars at Hyams’ Wiltshire country home, Ramsbury Manor.
The bequest includes works by Stubbs, Burne-Jones, Millet and Turner, whose The Bridgewater Seapiece is on loan to the National Gallery.
Ramsbury Manor was the site of what was thought to be Britain’s largest domestic burglary in February 2006. Golden age clocks, English and Continental porcelain and silver were taken – only a fraction of which have been recovered.
Anteater picks up €1.2m Paris price
A REMBRANDT Bugatti bronze of The Giant Anteater (Le Grand Fourmilier) more than lived up to its status as a potential star in Paris.
The sculpture, above right, went under the hammer in the first ‘prestige’ sale to be held by the new Paris auction team of Guillaume Crait and Thomas Müller on December 2 at the Hotel Drouot.
In a full room, it drew strong demand and easily overtook its €600,000- 800,000 estimate to sell at €1.2m (£1m), the highest sum paid for the sculptor’s work at auction in France.
The 19in (47.5cm) wide patinated bronze was a lost-wax cast by the Hébrard foundry pre-1934 and was numbered 5 on the plinth.
Most read
The most clicked-on stories for week December 8-14 on antiquestradegazette.com
1 Camden Passage antiques trade battle ‘tsunami’ of water
2 Jordaens’ Holy Family leads Christie’s auction after withdrawals
3 Watercolour of lost palace of Nonsuch saved for the nation
4 Zulu War Rorke’s Drift 1879 medal makes record at auction
5 Museum slams ‘Van Gogh sketchbook’
Keverne locates pirate treasure
LONDON Asian art dealer Roger Keverne has donated a Chinese export painting (below) depicting pirates on the China coast to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum.
Keverne, who is also chairman of Asian Art in London, bought the painting three years ago from a US collector. After discussions to offer it for sale for £85,000, he chose to donate it to the museum.
The painting is important to the museum because it depicts legendary pirate Cheung Po Tsai and will help with a project to portray maritime life in the Pearl River Delta during the 19th century.
Chinese collector’s seal of approval
A CHINESE hardstone imperial seal set a record at Drouot in Paris on December 14 when Pierre Bergé & Associés sold this impressively carved 4in (10.5cm) square specimen, inscribed Qianlong Yu Bi Zhi Bao, for a hammer price of €17.5m (£14.58m).
Setting a new top sum for a Chinese seal, it was bought by a Chinese collector after 15 minutes of intense bidding.
Seals belonging to the Qianlong Emperor are among the most prized works of art for Chinese buyers.
Carved in high relief in bi-coloured steatite from Fujian province, the decoration, featuring nine dragons entwined in clouds, is packed with symbolic significance.
The seal also has a desirable provenance. It came from a private collection and was acquired at the end of the 19th century by a young doctor who worked in the navy and whose travels took him to China.
This sale was just one of a raft of Asian auctions taking place in Paris last week. Among the others was a €22.5m auction at Christie’s which was topped at a multi-estimate €12m (£10m) by an 11th century gilt bronze figure of the Buddha Vairocana.
In Numbers
£23.5m
Bumper hammer total from the trio of Mod Brit art sales just held in the major London rooms. See p34-35
