Previous Posts: January 2014

The picture is an enchanting early view painting which shows the Fondamenta Nuove busy with small boats and gondolas, the island of San Michele and beyond the snow-capped Dolomites. It was painted for a British Grand Tourist in 1758, and is now on display in the Britain and Italy Gallery. This Guardi work is marvellously fresh and instinctually responsive to the beauty of his native city.

[The] picture has been lent to the Ashmolean from a private collection and it is a particularly exciting event for me as a historian of Dutch and Flemish art. The Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet by Rembrandt van Rijn ranks amongst the finest Old Master paintings in this country. It has just been hung in the Mallet Gallery at the heart of our outstanding collection of great European paintings. Painted in 1657, it shows the 50-year-old Catrina Hooghsaet, who lived in Amsterdam. She was a member of a Mennonite — a radical Protestant community — and dressed in the restrained style they favoured. She was, however, a very wealthy woman and wears a rich silk dress with a lace collar and holds a tasselled lace handkerchief. She looks towards her pet parakeet, of which she was evidently very fond. The painting is one of the finest portraits ever made by Rembrandt. It is an enormous privilege to be able to show it at the Ashmolean where it can be seen by millions of visitors over the next few years.

[...] the owner of the work, the newsprint magnate Peter M. Brant, said Christie’s certainly made no money from him. To secure his business, the house waived the seller’s commission, he said, and then, as a sweetener, gave him a large share of the buyer’s fees.

“I was not required to give them anything from the buyer’s commission until it reached a certain price — which it did not make,” Mr. Brant said in an interview, rather wistfully, since he was hoping for a higher price.

Factor in Christie’s other costs — buying insurance and newspaper ads, publishing glossy catalogs, moving the towering Balloon Dog to its Rockefeller Center headquarters, where it was parked outside for gawking — and the possibility of making lots of money seems to be limited.

Police are investigating a fraud scam which saw a £100,000 painting stolen from an 89-year-old woman's home in London. Detectives say the woman was contacted by telephone by a person claiming her bank cards had been used in a crime.

The woman was told she needed to call her bank immediately. She tried to call the bank, but the caller had not hung up and stayed on the line. The victim then believed she was speaking to her bank - but she was still speaking to the original caller.

The woman was told that someone would come to her house to collect her cards. The victim was also asked whether she had any items of value in the house. She mentioned a £100,000 painting by Samuel Palmer, called The Comet of 1858.

Police say a man, believed to be aged in his 30s, around 5ft 10ins with dark hair and an English accent, later came to the home and stole the painting, bank cards and jewellery.

With regards to your 'Nicked' article:

'a man, believed to be aged in his 30s, around 5ft 10ins with dark hair and an English accent', sound familiar?

She can certainly afford to collect blue-chip art on her own. Born in New York, she was Mr. Wynn's college sweetheart but also became his closest confidant, a business-savvy executive who co-founded his global casino empire, which at one point included Vegas casinos such as the Bellagio and Treasure Island as well newer outposts in Macau. He still owns Wynn Las Vegas and Encore at Wynn Las Vegas. The pair married in 1963, divorced in 1986, remarried in 1991 and divorced again in 2010, by all accounts amicably. As part of the divorce settlement, she was granted Wynn Resorts stock valued at $741 million; she remains director of the company and sits on the board of Wynn Las Vegas. Last fall, around the time she bought the Bacon, Forbes estimated her net worth to be roughly $1.9 billion.

i bet these poshos are straight on Google once the cameras turn off #fakeorfortune

A one-day conference on relations between the art market in history and the art market today, organized by Sotheby's Institute of Art – London and The Burlington Magazine, to be held at Sotheby’s Institute of Art - London on Friday 31 October 2014.

The aim of this joint conference is to explore critically what the history of the art market can teach us about the behaviour of the art market today, and vice versa. We hope to bring together historians of the art market working on a wide range of historical periods and places, and utilising varying methodologies, and to engage them in creative dialogue, via thematic groupings, with present-day art market experts of different kinds. We hope that a wide range of expertise and interests will be represented from both the past and the present dimensions of this subject.

Many fundamental topics are implicated in this conference, for example the nature of consumerism in societies past and present, the history and nature of art collecting, and the role of art institutions. We have singled out four key themes for this event which we envisage will comprise discreet sessions: 

• Modes of artistic production, market strategies and sale
• Localities, networks and globalization
• Value and valuation
• Patrons and dealers

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Luke Syson was a curator of Renaissance art, of transcendent paintings of saints and solemn Italian ladies -- serious art. And then he changed jobs, and inherited the Met's collection of ceramics -- pretty, frilly, "useless" candlesticks and vases. He didn't like it. He didn't get it. Until one day … (Filmed at TEDxMet.)

The painting was previously thought to be a portrait of the king painted after his death. Now, after thorough scientific examination of the oak, experts believe Henry VIII may have posed for an unknown artist in 1544, three years before his death. The wood is believed to date back to 1529.

The painting has an inscription on it stating that it was painted when the Monarch was aged 54, in the 36th year of his reign, but it was common for information to be placed on later copies.

But a closer look at the inscription showed it had been added at the same time the portrait was created.

Elizabeth Norton, an author and historian of the Tudor monarchy, said: 'He died in January 1547 and suffered from ill-health for much of 1546. There aren’t any paintings of him depicted as as old man.

'It may well be the last painting that he posed for.'

I have the same reaction to all these portraits of Henry VIII: that was one very, very frightening man!!

Thomas Zipp's exhibition with the title Task Dependence of the Effect of Standards on the Perception of a Series of Objects at the gallery SVIT in Prague narrates to several spheres in our society. In this installation Thomas Zipp thematizes his long-time interest in the research in the area of psychophysics, specifically in the relationship of man to plants. The exhibition transform human (life) cycles to basic elements such as feeding; plants as eatable form, instrument as entertainment. The gallery space is transformed into a laboratory, where the artist and his colleagues present performances; they play music -- and hope that they influence the plants; if not the plants, then in any case the observers. In the interview Zdenek Felix talks about the background of Thomas Zipp's project and the installation on display. Thomas Zipp talks in detail about the specially produced new works. The show runs until January 18, 2014.

This is neither science (no control or measurement of results) nor art, just self indulgent humans. An example of western human sociology fit for Spengler.

'At the Royal Academy', by Thomas Hardy

These summer landscapes--clump, and copse, and croft - Woodland and meadowland--here hung aloft, Gay with limp grass and leafery new and soft,

Seem caught from the immediate season's yield I saw last noonday shining over the field, By rapid snatch, while still are uncongealed

The saps that in their live originals climb; Yester's quick greenage here set forth in mime Just as it stands, now, at our breathing-time.

But these young foils so fresh upon each tree, Soft verdures spread in sprouting novelty, Are not this summer's, though they feign to be.

Last year their May to Michaelmas term was run, Last autumn browned and buried every one, And no more know they sight of any sun.

Regarding the post on your blog on the poem for the Rubenianum (which, by the way, is as bad in Dutch as in English): there is W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, although it is more about a painting than about the institution mentioned in the title.