Museums and Institutions

NEXT year’s Watercolour and Drawings Fair will move to a new venue, the Royal Academy rooms at 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1, where it will run from February 3 to 6 with an opening evening preview on February 2.

THE National Maritime Museum has purchased two prints from a London dealer following its appeal in the Antiques Trade Gazette for information about two missing William Hodges paintings.

PLANS are advanced for a new international London art fair next summer at the Royal Academy’s Burlington Gardens premises.

ASIAN Art in London will open with what promises to be a spectacular launch party at the Victoria & Albert Museum on Friday, November 5.

THE National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) has criticised the state of public collecting in the UK on the same day as announcing a £500,000 offer to help keep the Macclesfield Psalter in the UK.

ONE of London’s most treasured small museums faces a funding crisis after a rent rise and the rejection of its grant application by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Badges by Philip Atwood, published by the British Museum Press. ISBN 0714150142 £7.99sb AMONG the British Museum’s priceless antiquities is the museum’s collection of some 12,000 badges. A small, hard-to-find exhibition, showing at the museum until January 16, presents just a tiny fraction of this archive.

THE seventh annual Asian Art in London week will take place this year from November 4 to 12, with a launch party at the Victoria and Albert Museum on November 5.

THE Victoria and Albert Museum’s main autumn exhibition, opening this month, is devoted to a retrospective of Christopher Dresser, the pioneering designer who anticipated many of the major design styles of the 20th century. It is timed to coincide with the centenary of his death in 1904.

IT is not often that an antiques dealer ends up on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, but until September 19 that is just what is happening.

THE work of the pioneering Victorian designer Christopher Dresser is soon to have a major public airing in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum opening this September. In the meantime the rarest examples of his iconic designs continue to command high prices in the marketplace.

THE National Maritime Museum are asking for help in tracking down two missing paintings by William Hodges. The works The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War were last seen at a European Museum sale at Christie’s in 1813.

THE widow of Baron Heini von Thyssen, the billionaire art collector, has loaned a huge new collection to the museum he founded in Madrid, the Thyssen Bornemisza.

THOSE wanting access to the 1.8m photographs and reproductions of paintings, drawings and engravings at the Witt Library will now have to register and pay a fee.

Aurel Stein on the Silk Road, by Susan Whitfield, published by the British Museum Press. ISBN 0714124168 £18.99hb SIR Marc Aurel Stein, the 19th century Hungarian-born explorer, adventurer and archaeologist, sent home more than 40,000 cultural treasures from the wilds of Western China, making eight major expeditions along the Silk Road nearly a century ago and following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and the 7th century Buddhist pilgrim monk Xuanzang.

TWO of the biggest names in British art will mastermind this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which will run at the Academy’s galleries on London’s Piccadilly from June 8 to 16.

ALEXANDER Walker, who died last year at the age of 73, was the film critic of London’s Evening Standard for more than 40 years and among the well-known names in the film world. Not so well known is that he was a noted collector of modern art.

Pictured right is one of two major pieces of Georg Jensen silver stolen in a raid on Denmark’s National Art Gallery in the early hours of May 2. The thieves involved got away with an estimated £70,000 worth of silver that formed part of an exhibition featuring the work of the celebrated Danish silversmith.

TOWARDS the end of March it was reported that The British Museum and the V&A had joined forces for the first time to acquire a rare Indian 7th century metal statue of a standing figure of the Buddha Sakyamuni, the first to enter a public European collection. After a tour of provincial museums it will be shown alternatively at the two institutions.

AFTER 19 years, The London Original Print Fair is still the only event of its kind in Europe and it goes from strength to strength, as you will see when it runs this week from April 22 to 25 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.