Fine Art

ARTS Minister Tessa Blackstone has placed a temporary bar on the export of an important drawing, Study for the Institution of the Eucharist, by Federico Barocci (1528-1612).

USA: Mixed signals emerged from New York’s crucial November round of Part I Impressionist and Modern sales, the most significant test of the international art market since September 11.

USA: Swann Galleries will hold their inaugural auction of Contemporary Art on the evening of Tuesday, November 13 at their 104 East 25th Street New York premises. The sale comprises about 170 examples of photo-based artworks, paintings, prints and drawings as well as mixed media pieces and multiples by late 20th century artists.

THIS year’s annual International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair, scheduled for October 31 to November 4, has been cancelled with the forced closure of the Seventh Regiment Armory to non-military activities.

The rediscovery of a significant work by a major Old Master painter is always an event for the art trade, even if the work not obviously commercial. When Anthony Blunt wrote his monograph on Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) this painting, right, of The Holy Family with St. John the Baptist, executed c.1627-28 when the young Poussin first worked in Rome, was only known from engravings.

IN May 1967 Caroline Lumley and Camilla Cazalet quickly began establishing Lumley Cazalet (33 Davies Street, W1K 4LR. Tel: 020 7491 4767) as leading specialists in late 19th and 20th century prints, with an emphasis on the French School.

It’s a case of two days only with Ryan Fine Art’s (74 Vanbrugh Park, Blackheath, SE3 7JQ. Tel: 020 8293 5300) exhibition of over 80 Victorian and European oils, watercolours and prints.

COPENHAGEN: Combining the current commercial attractions of Denmark’s so-called Golden Age painters of the early 19th century with plein air oil sketches by artists made in Italy during the same period, an intriguing group of small canvases by three, albeit relatively minor Danish Golden Age artists sketching in Italy proved to be a predictably desirable target on the second day of Bruun Rasmussen’s (25% buyer’s premium) September 3-5 sale in Copenhagen.

Scottish painting is, as we know, one of the stronger sectors of the UK art market, but William Page Atkinson Wells (1872-1923) is not one of its better known names.

DENMARK: IN September last year, Copenhagen auctioneers Museumsbygningen (25% buyer’s premium) created a stir by achieving DKr1,000,000 (£85,470) for an oil study of a nude by Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-1873) dating from January 3, 1833, the day on which Professor C.F. Eckersberg and five pupils made the first ever paintings of a female life model at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

A ‘LOST’ painting by the great 17th century French painter Nicolas Poussin has come to light and will be offered for sale by Galerie Koller in Zurich on October 5.

Members of the trade still looking for a suitable holiday destination could do worse than consider Pirate’s Cove on Cocos Island, the subject of this Montague Dawson oil on canvas, 3ft 4in by 4ft 2in, which appeared at Christie’s Maritime sale in New York on July 31.

One of the great names of 17th-century Spanish still life painting is undoubtedly that of Juan van der Hamen, whose brief career as a court painter in Madrid spanned the decade of the 1620s.

UK: SIR Alfred James Munnings proved as great a magnet as ever at Sotheby’s South’s Billingshurst rooms on July 18 when a watercolour sketch for one of his oil paintings fetched a hammer price of £62,000, more than double the low estimate.

UK: After months of speculation as to whether Tim Clifford might be able to secure a private treaty purchase on behalf of the National Galleries of Scotland, Michelangelo’s (1475-1564) pen and ink Study of a Mourning Woman finally came under the hammer at Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) July 11 Old Master drawings sale with an estimate of £5-7m.

UK: The highest and arguably most unexpected result in the 19th century section of Sotheby’s July 11 Works of Art sale came with the piece pictured here, a 3ft 7in (1.1m) high silvered statue of Galatea by Max Klinger which sold for £220,000. The subject is a characteristically symbolist work showing the sea nymph seated on a mottled grey marble throne carved with dolphins and is perhaps inspired by Gustave Doré’s painting shown at the 1880 Salon, and by Huysmann’s novel A Rebours.

UK: A week of exhibitions and sales of Old Master drawings reached its zenith on July 10 when this miniature silverpoint sketch by Leonardo da Vinci appeared at Christie’s King Street.

UK: The white marble form of Cara, the Marquess of Breadalbane’s Venetian Greyhound, was the focus of bidders at Lyon and Turnbull’s sale in Edinburgh on June 30. Royal sculptor Peter Turnerelli (1774-1839), famous for his full-length statue of George III in state robes, modelled the 2ft 2in (65cm) high statue for the Park Lane apartment of the Breadalbanes, and invoiced the Countess for £210 in February 1811.

Recent documentary evidence suggests that the lithographic stones for the 79 plates by Smit and Keulemans after Joseph Wolf that illustrate Daniel Giraud Elliot’s Monograph of the Phasanidae or Family of Pheasants were destroyed after only 150 copies had been taken.

Illustrated is one of Lord Frederic Leighton’s most famous compositions Flaming June. This 41/2in by 41/4in colour sketch for the painting was understandably one of the sensations of Sotheby’s dispersal of the Leverhulme Collection at Thornton Manor, Merseyside, on June 26-28.