New curator post at the National Trust
November 21 2016
Picture: National Trust
The National Trust is looking for a new Director of Curation and Experience. The idea, and I think it's a good one, is to elevate a curatorial voice to the board level of the Trust. The job description is full of the usual buzzwords about 'interpretation', but I was reassured to see that one of the criteria is; you will be recognised as an expert'. I hope this means an expert in actual historical objects, rather than beanbags.
The salary is £120,000. Closing date 1st December. More details here.
Fitzwilliam frame appeal
November 21 2016
Video: Fitzwilliam Museum
The Fitzwilliam Museum is hoping to raise the final £70,000 of a £345,000 target to secure an extremely rare 1690s frame. The frame, as discussed by director Tim KNox in the video above, celebrated two important naval victories by Adrmieal Russel during the Nine Years War. More details here, and on the Frame Blog here.
Re-discovered Copley in Edinburgh
November 21 2016
Picture: Lyon & Turnbull
Lyon & Turnbull here in Edinburgh is my 'local' auction house. It's premises are a rather glorious 18th Century chapel. This week they'll be auctioning a previously unknown portrait thought to be by John Singleton Copley, the American artist who came to practice in England in 1774. Long called 'Copley', it appears to have escaped the attention of the Copley literature until now, and is therefore catalogued rather cautiously as 'attributed to Copley'. I saw the picture last week, and though I'm no Copley expert I think it is most likely by him. There's a related picture in the US (the sitter served in Fraser's Highlanders during the American Revolution) which was also called Copley. The estimate is rather enticing, at £20k-£30k. More here.
Update - it fetched only £23k. Some doubts about that 'attributed to'?
David Bowie's Tintoretto (ctd.)
November 20 2016
Picture: Sotheby's
A happy update to my report on the Tintoretto sold from the David Bowie collection - it will now be going on long-term loan to the Rubenshuis museum in Antwerp. Rubens made many copies after Tintoretto.
Van Gogh's lost sketchbook?
November 20 2016
Video: CBC
The publication of an apparently 'lost' sketchbook by Van Gogh - available for sale here in facsimile - has caused a dispute amongst Van Gogh scholars. The book, never before recorded was supposedly discovered in the same area in France, Arles, where Van Gogh left it shortly before he died. It has been in a cupboard more or less ever since, the owners being unaware of what it was. In the video above we see Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, the Canadian art historian and Van Gogh specialist, say why she is convinced they are by Van Gogh. She is supported by others who have written on Van Gogh, including Ronald Pickvance.
But here is a strong and confident take down by the Van Gogh museum, who have rejected the attribution of the drawings, and say the whole thing is a clever fake. Intriguingly, the museum refers to "various owners of drawings from the album", which implies the album has been sold to multiple parties, presumably as a speculation.
I'm no Van Gogh expert by any stretch, so can't begin to comment on the authenticity. Except to say that I find some of the portraits to be quite modern in their characterisation.
Nicholas II portrait found behind Lenin
November 20 2016
Video: Russia Today
After the Russian Revolution, artist Vladislav Izmailovich was tasked with painting many portraits of Lenin. When conservators recently repaired one of his works, at the St. Petersburg’s Stieglitz Art and Industry Academy, they discovered that in one case he had re-used a portrait of Nicholas II. The Lenin portrait was not painted directly over Nicholas, but on the reverse of the canvas. The Nicholas portrait was covered up, but only with 'washable paint', and thus able to be removed decades later in a different political climate. Comrade Izmailovich, AHN salutes you!
Waldemar on the Turner Prize
November 17 2016
Picture: BBC
The great Waldemar has a new programme about the Turner Prize on BBC2 this Saturday, 10.10pm. More here.
Who'll save £1.2m Hogarth?
November 17 2016
Picture: ACE/Guardian
The UK government has placed a temporary export bar on a £1.2m Hogarth painting, the Christening, which has been sold to an overseas buyer. A UK museum or private buyer has up to six months to make a matching offer. More here.
Landseer's 'Monarch of the Glen' to be sold (ctd.)
November 17 2016
Picture: BBC
The sale of Landseer's famous 'Monarch of the Glen' at Christie's in December has been halted. It has now been offered to the National Galleries of Scotland for £4m. The upper estimate at Christie's, while not made public, was thought to have been £10m. The NGS has launched an appeal.
I can't quite understand what Diageo, who own the picture, are playing at. Either they need the money or they don't. They planned to sell it because it no longer served any purpose for the core business, they said. But then it transpired that there would be a PR price to pay if the picture ended up overseas. All of which was very predictable. And indeed I am told that senior voices within the company said as much before the decision was made.
So now they've decided to withdraw the painting (one wonders if they've paid the usual hefty fees associated with this, I presume so), and offered the picture to the NGS for a bargain price. But the thing is Diageo still looks mean, and as having no regard for Scottish heritage. £4m is just over .13% of last year's total profits of £3billion. It's the sort of decision that only some soulless management person could make. They should either give it to the NGS outright or let it stay there on long term loan.
Update - a reader writes:
Under the Cultural Gifts Scheme, Diageo can claim 20 % of the value of a gift as a tax deduction. On the reported valuation of £10 million for the Landseer, this would be £2 million. They have apparently decided to give away half of the remaining value, and asked the NGS to find the balance of £4 million. Under the CGS, this must happen in the current tax year, hence, presumably, the deadline of April for the fund-raising.
Hockney's 'Woldgate Woods'
November 17 2016
Video: Sotheby's
Sotheby's are selling one of Hockney's late, large landscapes tonight. The estimate is $9m-$12m. I like these pictures, and loved the RA exhibition. There's something rather anaesthetising about the Sotheby's commentary in the video above.
Update - it made $11.7m
Sewell's National Gallery bequest
November 17 2016
Picture: National Gallery
A bequest by the late Great Brian to the National Gallery was announced today. From the NG press release:
"As a child, there was not a major museum or art gallery in London I didn’t know, and the National Gallery was my favourite.” (Brian Sewell interviewed in The Daily Telegraph, June 2012)
The legendary Evening Standard art critic would often talk about the weekly visits he made to the National Gallery as a child imbuing him with his love of art, indeed he once quipped “I’m leaving my body to science, and if there’s anything left, they can burn it, mix the ashes with bird food and scatter them on the steps of the National Gallery.” (Mail on Sunday, April 2014)
Therefore it is fitting that a much-loved work from his private art collection will today (Thursday 17 November 2016) go on display in the National Gallery, presented as a gift to the Gallery following his death in September 2015.
Maternal Affection is a small (43.5 x 34.5 cm) oil on copper work from 1773 by the French artist Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. It can be viewed in Room 33 from this morning, alongside works by fellow French painters such as Fragonard, Vernet, and Watteau.
The subject of Maternal Affection cannot be precisely identified. It takes place in a loggia and shows a woman nursing a child, with another infant held towards her by one of her female companions. Another woman is placing (or removing) bedding in the form of a pillow in or from a wooden crib. In this picture of quiet contentment Lagrenée has sought balance – balance in the colours of the costumes both of, and between, the individual figures, and balance in composition. Maternal Affection is highly typical of the small-scale paintings that the artist made for private collectors.
There are currently 11 paintings by Lagrenée in Great Britain: seven at Stourhead (National Trust) and four at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle - therefore Maternal Affection is the only one by the artist on public display in a national collection.
Eighteenth-century French paintings are sparsely represented in the Gallery, and this generous gift helps to extend our collection in this area. Maternal Affection also adds to our understanding of the reception of 17th-century Bolognese painting in 18th-century Europe - Lagrenée’s style was greatly influenced by his admiration of the great Bolognese painters of the previous century, in particular the work of Guido Reni.
Christopher Riopelle, National Gallery Curator of Post-1800 Paintings and Acting Curator of 18-century French painting said: “The painting is a beautifully preserved oil on copper of exquisite refinement which allows the National Gallery for the first time to show the work of an artist who was hugely admired by the most discriminating connoisseurs and collectors of contemporary French art, both French and foreign, in the final decades of the 18th century
National Gallery Director, Dr Gabriele Finaldi said ”Brian Sewell had a profound love for the National Gallery as well as a connoisseur's passion for lesser known masters, so it is especially pleasing that Lagrenée's beautiful and refined Maternal Affection which he owned has come to the Gallery as a gift from his estate.”
Maternal Affection can now be seen in Room 33 of the National Gallery hanging alongside other French 18th-century paintings by artists such as Boucher, Vigée Le Brun, Boilly, Nattier, Detroy, and Vernet.
Update - a reader writes:
I was really happy to see that Brian Sewell did bequeath a painting to the National Gallery. After the sale of his collection at Christies recently, I thought that he had left them nothing despite his affection for the place. But “Maternal Affection” 1773, by Louis Lagrenee looks a beautiful example of the kind of French 18th Century painting that the NG would never usually acquire---so a fitting tribute to Mr. Sewell’s taste and his eye!
Tump's fake Renoir
November 17 2016
Picture: Mail Online
A Daily Mail inspection of Trump's New York apartment reveals that his wife, Melania, has in her office a copy of Renoir's La Loge. The original is in the Courtauld.
Apologies
November 17 2016
Picture: BG
I'm sorry for the lack of blogging lately, I've been in London cramming in various meetings. First I was at the BBC. Then I went to Windsor to look at some picture files in the Royal Collection; x-rays of a Van Dyck. (By chance I also had a brief audience with the Queen, in the form of her portrait by Lucien Freud, the one The Sun declared to be 'A Travesty Your Majesty' when it was unveiled. As a portrait of the Queen it really tells us hardly anything. It's a far better portrait of Freud.) Then I had a fruitful session at my restorer's in London, where we summoned up the courage to tackle an old layer of overpaint on the background of a head study by Van Dyck. In the photo above you can see some of the swabs. Finally I had some meetings about the ongoing fake Old Master scandal; more on that soon.
I need to file a piece for The Art Newspaper today, then I'll post some articles here later.
'Am I Rembrandt?'
November 14 2016
Video: Dulwich Picture Gallery
There's an interesting new mini-exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, looking at what is and is not 'a Rembrandt'. (Or rather, 'Rembraaandt' as it's pronounced here).
Curatorial pay (ctd.)
November 14 2016
Picture: TAN
AHN likes to keep a sharp eye on curatorial salaries in the UK; they are in many cases worryingly low. I was interested to see The Art Newspaper drawing parallels between curatorial pay grades and those tasked with museum communication in this digital age:
A recent ad for the new communications director post at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London specified that candidates “make best use of existing and emerging social media channels”. The estimated salary for the role is £100,000—around double that of a senior curator at the museum’s planned outpost in east London, advertised last year with a pay band of £36,546 to £54,561.
The Apollo Awards
November 14 2016
Picture: Palazzo Pitti, via Apollo, Van Dyck's portrait of Cardinal Bentivoglio
The Apollo Magazine Awards shortlist have been announced. There's a bounty of Old Masters in their 'acquisition of the year' category. And the excellent Frick show on Van Dyck's portraiture is in the exhibition category.
Re-discovered Ensor to be sold
November 14 2016
Picture: Artinfo/Sotheby's
A previously unknown work by James Ensor has been identified by Sotheby's and will be sold by them in Paris in December, with an estimate of €1m-€1.5m. More here on Blouin Artinfo.
Sleeper Alert!
November 14 2016
Picture: Karl und Faber
The above small 'Florentine School' painting at Karl und Faber auction house in Germany, estimated at €3k-€4k, made €375k last week. The name Filippino Lippi has been suggested, and indeed the cataloguing of the picture on the auction house website has subsequently been amended to say that. Here's a comparable picture in the North Carolina Museum of Art.
'Portrait of the Artist' - review
November 14 2016
Picture: BG
Here's my Financial Times review of the new Royal Collection exhibition, Portrait of the Artist. It's a great show, well worth a visit.
Other reviewers seem to like it too (though most of these are behind a paywall): here's The Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard, Sunday Times. You may need to register to see my FT piece, but the free article allowance there is generous.
The photo above shows Rubens' portrait of Van Dyck. It's a fine picture, but almost more interesting for what it isn't. The gaze is not direct, there isn't any obvious sign Van Dyck is a painter, nor that they were friends or colleagues. It's subtler than that, and all the more powerful for it. Standing in front of it is, for a fan of both Rubens and Van Dyck, really quite profound - you don't often get to see a confluence of so much creative genius in one picture. I didn't have space to mention the picture in the FT piece, and instead focused on the self-portrait element of the show. Interestingly, for a long time Rubens' portrait of Van Dyck was wrongly thought to be a self-portrait. It's far less emphatic than Van Dyck's self-portraits though, and, in terms of determining what Van Dyck was really like, perhaps a useful contrast to them.
David Bowie's Tintoretto
November 11 2016
Picture: Sotheby's
As the Art Market Monitor reports, the Bowie Collection evening sale at Sotheby's did well, with all of the 47 lots sold and bringing in a total of £24.3m. I was glad to see that his Tintoretto, above, sold for £191,000 against an estimate of £100,000-£150,000.
