Barely a year after the 195-year-old London gallery Agnew’s closed down, it is to reopen under new ownership. Backed by Boston Old Master collector and investor Cliff Schorer, Agnew’s is to be revived, with Old Master dealer Anthony Crichton-Stuart at the helm.

Crichton-Stuart was previously head of Old Master paintings at Christie’s in New York, and subsequently a director of Noortman Master Paintings, an art dealing subsidiary of Sotheby’s that also closed down last year. When Agnew’s closed, outgoing chairman Julian Agnew kept the company’s name, some remaining stock, and a valuable library and archive, all of which has now been sold to the new owners. “Agnew’s is more than a name,” said Crichton-Stuart, alluding to the value of prestige, without revealing its price. “It represents one of the most successful art dealing businesses in history.”

Very interesting news about the sale and revival of Agnew's, but the wonderful Agnew's archive is not part of the transaction. It has actually been (or is in the process of being) acquired by the National Gallery. The University of Manchester and the National Gallery will shortly announce a new PhD studentship to work on the archive. Even better news for students of the history of the market and collecting.

The National Gallery has acquired the archive of art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd following the firm’s decision to close its Albemarle Street gallery in 2013. The archive, which dates back to the 1850s, consists of detailed stockbooks, daybooks, diaries and huge leather-bound account ledgers that give unprecedented insight into the activity of one of the world’s most important international art dealers. It complements the National Gallery’s own rich archive and establishes the Gallery as a centre of research for the study of collecting, the art market, taste and provenance. Researchers will benefit from improved access to an outstanding and little-studied collection spanning more than 150 years of history.

Agnew’s archive provides a remarkably detailed record of the activities of the firm, which during its history has had branches in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Paris, New York and Berlin. It includes the records of famous paintings that have passed through Agnew’s, including Velázquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ and Bellini’s Feast of the Gods. It also holds information about the company’s involvement with major collectors from around the world. Exceptionally, Agnew’s has remained a family firm from its inception and the archive includes items of a more personal or immediate nature, such as Victorian diaries of overseas trips. Letters and digital information will complete the record through the 20th century up to the end of 2013, the later material being transferred to the National Gallery in stages over the next three decades.

The archive was offered at a discounted price of £240,000, for which sum it was generously purchased and donated to the Gallery by the National Gallery Trust.

Julian Agnew said on behalf of Agnew’s, “I am delighted that our fascinating archive has found such a prestigious permanent home, where the records of the firm and of its influence on the history of taste and collecting will be available to both scholars and the general public.”

Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, said, “Agnew’s has been at the centre of the art trade for almost 200 years and importantly during the late 19th century and early 20th century when major shifts in collections between the UK and USA were taking place. As the largest and most influential dealer of its age, the information held within the archive is of international significance and has outstanding research value.”

The addition of Agnew’s archive to the National Gallery Research Centre is significant in that it is the first time the Gallery has collected an archive that is not closely bound to its own history. The Gallery will catalogue the archive, and this is expected to be completed within two years. However, the Gallery aims to make the archive as accessible as possible during that time.

A Leonardo da Vinci painting discovered by a dealer at an American estate sale was sold last year in a private transaction for more than $75 million.

The painting, Leonardo’s oil-on-panel “Salvator Mundi,” showing Christ half-length with a crystal orb in his left hand, had been owned by a consortium that included the New York art traders Alexander Parish and Robert Simon.

The heavily restored painting, dating from about 1500, was bought by an unidentified collector for between $75 million and $80 million in May 2013, in a private sale brokered by Sotheby’s. The details of the purchase have remained locked in confidentiality clauses until they were revealed this week by trade insiders, such as the London dealer Anthony Crichton-Stuart.

[...] these days you just aren't posh if you can't talk the talk about contemporary art.

Attempts to discreetly snap photos of Michelangelo’s David may no longer have to stay hidden. The Accademia Gallery is taking concrete steps toward relaxing its rules regarding photos inside the museum.

At the beginning of 2014, the Accademia conducted a two-week experiment, allowing visitors to use their cameras, smartphones and tablets as they pleased. Flash photography was still forbidden and visitors were reminded that their images were restricted to personal use. 

Museum director Angelo Tartuferi explained, ‘Over the course of this experiment, we noticed many significant, positive consequences from this relaxation of the rules; museum visitors, tour guides, and, most importantly, our security staff took note of these as well.’

In the past, members of security staff have fought a losing battle trying to prevent visitors from taking pictures. There have even been public clashes between security officials and visitors who continue to photograph David after being instructed to stop.

According to the museum officials, the logic behind this initiative is that there is little harm in allowing tourists to take home a memento of their museum visit, or share artistic treasures with friends on social media. The pending change will still require visitors to be respectful and cautious in their approach to the artworks. Accademia officials have sent a letter to the Department of Cultural Heritage outlining the idea, but are currently awaiting approval.

In fact, according to a recent Pew Institute survey, 81% of museums and galleries believe the internet and social media play a crucial role in supporting the arts. After decades of scaring potential supporters away (and missing out on the youngest generation completely) with endless snail mail and telephone marketing, smartphones and social media are providing museums like New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Los Angeles' Getty Museum — each of which boast millions of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram followers — a second chance at community-building.

[...] the text makes no mention of La Bella Principessa or the wonderfully precise science (of spectral, spatial, spiritual and other type of analysis of fingerprints found in obscure places on 'old' paintings) championed by Peter Biro [who found 'Leonardo's fingerprint' on La Bella Principessa. 

please upload a new blog post, I'm getting withdrawal symptoms, thanks

“This arrangement turns two great collections into one extraordinary collection,” said Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery. “The Corcoran will still have its own identity: a great facility with a distinguished building. It’s a way of keeping the Corcoran memory alive.”

If the plan is approved by the boards in April, it will put an end to years of money trouble for the Corcoran, which had some 103,000 visitors last year. The Corcoran currently runs a $2,071,129 deficit, has $2,787,690 of bank debt and an endowment that has shrunk over the last decade to only $18 million. It also has a $44 million acquisitions fund. Unlike the National Gallery, which does not charge for admissions, the Corcoran is one of the few museums in Washington that does ($10 for adults), a practice that has hampered its ability to attract a strong visitorship. If the plan is implemented, all exhibitions in its original home will be free to the public.

Over the years, the Corcoran has pursued a number of efforts to shore up its finances, including the sale of real estate. In 2010, it sold the Randall School, a former public school in Southwest Washington, where it once planned to relocate the college, for $6.5 million to the Miami collectors Donald and Mera Rubell and the developer Telesis. It also tried to sell the college’s current building in Georgetown, but the deal fell through. Last year, it announced the possibility of relocating from its historic building on 17th Street, but after a hailstorm of criticism its board changed its mind, saying the museum would stay put and look for other options. In June, the museum auctioned a group of Oriental carpets at Sotheby’s, which gave the Corcoran about $39 million, which went into its acquisitions fund.

Apparently, the Corcoran deal is largely about real estate, like so many London deals.  Their landmark building needed 100 million in repairs in addition to the endowment needing a major top up.  It was a situation which needed work a decade ago.  It wasn't principally about the art collection, which we view as paramount.

University of Maryland, a "red brick university" in UK terms located in an undesirable suburb, was negotiating to take over the Corcoran school to enhance its own offerings when GW University, already well endowed and a Corcoran neighbor in central DC stepped in to acquire the school and the two DC trophy properties which it wanted despite their needing major renovations which it can afford.  They offloaded the art to the National Gallery which will keep some, exhibit some in the Corcoran building which will mostly become a Contemporary art exhibition space and give the remainder to other museums.  

The school wasn't viable and the trustees were generous six figure contributors but it needed more than a hundred million quickly, a major endowment, a new direction and a refurbished image.  It didn't have a plan for the future that would make it sustainable and attract donors.

The Met Museum in NYC is great at selecting the right trustees, rotating trustees when they are less useful, and making brilliant choices of directors who are scholars with vision and are socially appealing.  This attracts donors and builds the Museum.  It all comes to management.  Management attracts assets, both art and funding.  This also is true in the dealer world.

The Barnes is a parallel, where the alleged purpose was a suburban school for art appreciation with a teaching collection with the government requiring some public access in exchange for its charitable status.  I lived a block away for three years when I was young and could just walk in because I knew the director, but the public was limited to two hundred visitors per day three then later four days a week with minimal parking and access.. The trustees let the endowment dwindle and squandered a lot of it fighting with its neighbors and the deMazia trust (another story).  No one would contribute with the trustees required by the Barnes will running things, but 100 million USD flowed in rapidly when it became a museum in town and open with normal hours and new trustees.

Of course children shouldn't be banned from museums, but what could be looked at are the number of school groups visiting, particularly the National Gallery. I understand that the best way to protect the future of Galleries & museums is to encourage young people from as early an age as possible, but on a visit two weeks ago it was almost impossible to move with any freedom around the galleries, by the sheer number of school groups. It must be in everyone's interest that these visits are staggered, it must be the NG's responsibility to see to this for everyone's enjoyment.

Celebrating the recent acquisition of Ozias Humphrey’s pastel portrait Baron Nagell’s Running Footman c.1795, this display will explore the emergence of pastel in the 18th century and its phenomenal, if relatively short-lived, success as a fashionable alternative to oil paint. Tracing its evolution from natural chalk – long used for figure and landscape sketches – into a full colour medium, this display will include many rarely exhibited works from the Tate collection. Featuring experimental pastel drawings by Thomas Gainsborough alongside finished portraits by leading pastellists such as John Russell and Daniel Gardner, it aims to demonstrate the central importance of the medium to the increasingly competitive 18th-century British art world.

Readers wanting to know some-more about because pastels had such an heated though brief impulse in a art chronological object should conduct towards a blog of pastel aristocrat Neil Jeffares, here, and also his new square for The Burlington website here.

One of the most extraordinary and excruciating episodes in the National Gallery's history is laid bare in an exhibition opening to the public on Wednesday: the state-sanctioned sale of paintings because they were German.

Susan Foister, co-curator of the show, Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance, described the disposal of 37 works in 1856 as a "surprising" and little-known story. "It was the first and only time that the gallery had an act of parliament passed in order to rid itself of excessive German paintings," she said.

The main issue was that for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, German art was considered ugly and certainly hugely inferior to anything produced in Italy. Sir Charles Eastlake, director of the National Gallery from 1855-65, once said he found the work of Matthias Grünewald "repulsive".

In 1854, William Gladstone, then chancellor of the exchequer, bought 64 German Renaissance paintings from the 15th and 16th centuries for the gallery. It was considered a scandal. One newspaper called them "frightful" and a parliamentarian said the purchase was the "worst ever" – what was the National Gallery thinking of?

Foister said that "there was an idea of what should be collected and what should be admired". And German paintings did not fit the idea.

Within just two years the gallery's trustees felt they had to get rid of them. That resulted in an act of parliament permitting their deaccession and 37 were sold, including most of an altarpiece from the Benedictine abbey of Liesborn in Germany.

It’s official! The art market has reached a new peak, and it’s good, old-fashioned painting, figurative and abstract, that’s driving it.

London’s auctions of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art sales over the past two weeks have amassed a record £709.5 million, a 39 per cent increase on last February and a 29 per cent increase over the last highest combined totals for these sales in London, achieved in June 2008. In dollar terms, they breached the $1 billion mark for the first time, reaching $1.2 billion.

Dr Bendor Grosvenor (the patrician art expert from Fake or Fortune?) has some atoning to do. A few years ago he made himself unpopular by spotting that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's best known painting of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the face on a million shortbread tins, wasn’t in fact Charlie. 

So here Grosvenor sets out to make amends, laying aside his gallery garb in favour of motorbike leathers to bomb around the country hunting for a genuine portrait of Charles Edward Stuart when he was the warrior prince leading the Jacobite Rebellion. The result is a terrific watch, as much history lesson as art caper: biker Grosvenor is a star in the making.

One detects a whiff of Daniel Craig going on.

So that's what you were filming in Scotland when you posted that lovely photo at the beach a while ago? ... Any wet shirt Darcy moments...? Or must we be satisfied with the tight leathers...

Cornelius Gurlitt was at all times convinced that he had inherited a collection from his father that predominantly consisted of so-called degenerate art from former German Reich property in public collections and museums. Cornelius Gurlitt was not aware that his collection also includes a few works that today can be qualified as looted art. Until the claims for return were asserted, Cornelius Gurlitt was in good faith. He was in good faith when he inherited the collection from his mother and remained in good faith when he originally acquired ownership of the works by way of acquisitive prescription. In this context, it should be taken into consideration that Hildebrand Gurlitt had first left his collection to his wife Helene. In 1968, Cornelius Gurlitt and his sister Benita inherited the collection. In accordance with German law, Cornelius Gurlitt has therefore long been the sole rightful owner of all 1,280 of the works seized.