Museum acquisitions

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.

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”.

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.

JUST as the world’s top golfers were teeing off for The Open at Muirfield last week, Scotland was celebrating another hole in one. Grants totalling more than £2m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the National Arts Collection Fund, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, St Andrews and private benefactors meant that the Scottish National Portrait Gallery could acquire the nation’s most important golfing painting, Charles Lees’ (1800-1880) oil on canvas, The Golfers (1847).

THE National Library of Ireland has acquired a sprawling collection of manuscripts by James Joyce, which remained hidden for nearly 60 years after being concealed from the Nazis.They include a total of some 700 pages in six notebooks, 16 drafts from Ulysses and typescripts and proofs of Finnegans Wake.

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.

ONE of the most important oils by Irish artist Louis le Brocquy (b.1916) is to return to Ireland after spending nearly 50 years in Italy.

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.

THE Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is to be the new home for Federico Barocci’s £1.3m drawing Study for The Institution of the Eucharist.

Manchester City Art Gallery, the underbidder at auction for the lantern which was the original model for Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, have secured the piece after all. The gallery underbid the lantern, pictured right, when it was sold to a private collector for £46,000 (plus 15% buyer’s premium) on November 1 at Bonhams Knightsbridge.

PICTURED right is just one of a number of rare and important artefacts whose sale to the nation has just been negotiated by Christie’s.The 14th century Norwegian carved ivory crozier head, which has been sold in lieu of inheritance tax and will go to the V&A, is an extremely rare example of late medieval Scandinavian carved ivory.

THE Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts has acquired one of the world’s most important collections of English Silver, that of Alan and Simone Hartman.

UK: A TEMPORARY export ban on an important reliquary from the Wernher Collection has allowed the V&A to acquire it with backing from the Lottery and the National Arts Collection Fund.

A MAJOR cataloguing project at the Museum of Cincinnati in Ohio has authenticated up to 15 very important and hitherto unrecorded portrait miniatures by the likes of Nicholas Hilliard.

UK: THE Saatchi Gallery is to distribute 39 works of Contemporary Art by British artists among seven regional galleries and museums.

THE second week of London’s prestige midsummer sales saw the Modern given way to the traditional with a flurry of exceptional prices for Old Master paintings and drawings and Renaissance works of art.

UK: LEADING London art dealer Simon Dickinson has announced the sale to the Brooklyn Museum of Art of the 14th century Florentine gold ground painting of Christ in Majesty which he bought for £66,000 at Dorchester rooms of Hy. Duke & Son on March 9

UK: A RARE catch indeed, the most important painting of its period in a British private collection, Botticelli’s Virgin Adoring the Christ Child, c.1490-1500, pictured right, has been acquired by the National Gallery of Scotland from the 10th Earl of Wemyss and March, who was about to sell it to America.

UK: A PERMANENT exhibition space for objects from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is to be part of the continuing development of London’s Somerset House as an arts complex.

UK: THE unknown British soldier who embroidered the crude depiction of his lonely blockhouse on the South African veld almost a century ago, could hardly have expected his work to end up on the hallowed walls of the National Army Museum in Chelsea, having provoked intense competition from international bidders at Bosley’s auction of militaria in Marlow on October 12.