Museums and Institutions

THE Tate Gallery has launched a campaign to raise £12.5m to acquire Sir Joshua Reynolds’ celebrated portrait of Omai, the South Sea Islander who took London Society by storm in the 18th century.

William Beckford 1760-1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, edited by Derek E Ostergard, published by Yale University Press ISBN 30009068. £50 hb

Thomas Gainsborough: A Country Life, by Hugh Belsey, published by Prestel. ISBN 379132784 £14.95hb

Pick of the Bligh relics sold at Christies King Street last month was the cup that he used to hold his meagre rations of bread and water, a coconut shell that bears his incised initials, the date April 1789 and, inscribed in ink around the rim, the words “The Cup I eat my miserable allowance of”.

York Art Gallery have just scrapped admission charges. The gallery houses 600 years of internationally important British and European works of art including painting by Bellotto, Hockney, Hepworth and York-born William Etty.

Interpreting Matisse/Picasso by Elizabeth Cowling, published by Tate Publishing. ISBN 1854373935 £9.99 pbk

Matisse Picasso published by Tate Publishing with essays by six international curators including the two British curators John Golding and Elizabeth Cowling. ISBN 1854373927 £40 hb, ISBN 1854373765 £29.99 sb

THE acquisition of a unique collection of Afghan textiles has highlighted the cash crisis at the British Museum. Despite spending £34,000 on the collection, including a £26,000 grant from the National Arts Collection Fund, the BM’s ethnographic textiles collection has nowhere to display it.

GERMANY: There was widespread relief in the art world last week when the Zwinger Palace museum was saved from the worst of the flooding in Dresden.

GERMANY: The world’s largest collection of Meissen porcelain has had to be rescued from serious flooding – only a week after plans were announced for the re-opening of the museum that houses it.

After three years of restoration work, the porcelain rooms of the Zwinger State Art Collection in Dresden are to re-open to the public on Sunday October 6.

Russian Myths by Elizabeth Warner, published by the British Museum Press. ISBN 0714127434 £8.99pb

REGIONAL museums are to search their archives for evidence of Nazi-looted art among their collections.

AT the end of this week the Gilbert Collection at Somerset House in London will unveil a new display of one of the most outstanding collections of silver.

THE Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has just acquired an important oil sketch by Sir Peter Paul Rubens thanks to grants from the National Arts Collection Fund and the Resource V&A Purchase Fund.

SHOWING at the V&A until June 9 is ‘Milan in a Van’, the pick of some of the best work at the Milan Furniture Fair, one of the world’s top design trade fairs which was held from April 10 to 15.

RESPONDING to the rise and rise of interest in 20th century design Le Salon du XXeme Siecle will be launched in Paris from June 6 to 9 at Le Carrousel du Louvre.

THE British Museum is being advised to sell off up to a fifth of its ‘spare’ exhibits to raise funds. The museum is already being forced to sell off valuable property and shed up to 180 jobs – including vital conservation posts – to stave off bankruptcy a year before its 250th anniversary.

SEVEN decades of work by Susie Cooper, one of Britain’s keynote ceramics designers, is the subject of ‘Susie Cooper Style’, an exhibition running until the autumn at the Wedgwood Story visitor centre at Barlaston, Stoke-on-Trent.

THE Heritage Lottery Fund have announced a grant of £404,500 to help the Walker Museum in Liverpool acquire an exquisite Weld Blundell Amber Cabinet, which was due for export.