Fine Art

Having dramatically grown the auction market for Banksy at their mixed media Vision 21 sales, Bonhams are embarking on a new venture – a dedicated sale of Urban Art.

Sotheby’s have agreed to sponsor Tate Britain’s Duveens Commission, thereby allowing this site-specific sculpture commission to become an annual rather than a biennial event.

Scottish auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull started off their year on January 10 with the sale of the Deloitte Art Collection at The Royal Academy in London.

THE 102-year-old Welsh artist Stanley Lewis (b.1905) is trying to locate the current whereabouts of his painting of The Crosyceilliog Blacksmiths.

The extraordinarily elaborate diptych from c.1350-75, shown here, will be on show at The Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House from January 10 to March 9.

WHAT looked like yet another Old Master sleeper in the provinces appeared in Gloucestershire on December 7.

The Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds scenes illustrated here are part of a superb group of 51 miniatures dating from the last years of the 12th century.

SMALL in size but large in shock value, this portrait miniature stunned the Gorringes’ saleroom when it sold at £90,000 plus 17.5 per cent buyer’s premium on December 6.

It is only 3.25in (8cm) high, but it made more than any sculpture or antiquity ever offered at auction.

Russian week in London saw over ten sales offered at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams and specialist Russian auctioneers MacDougall’s last week.

Gagosian’s bid gives Sotheby’s new heart

FOUR men have been bailed until Ferbruary 25 next year following the police investigation into the theft of five L.S. Lowry paintings.

The Art Fund have announced the five £1m winners of Art Fund International, the scheme dedicated to building collections of international contemporary art at regional UK museums and galleries.

Art dealer Andrew Sim has sold a watercolour by Richard Dadd (1817-1886) to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It is the first work by the enigmatic Victorian artist to enter the museum’s vast art collection.

New York Old Master dealers Salander-O’Reilly are expected to file for bankruptcy after a state judge ordered their gallery to be closed indefinitely.

ESTIMATED at just £1000-1500, a work catalogued as by a follower of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) has sold for £2.2m at the Gloucestershire saleroom of Moore, Allen & Innocent (15% buyer’s premium).

Whitfield Fine Art pull out as Salander-O’Reilly’s multi-million dollar legal problems escalate

FOUR men, including two lawyers, arrested in a police raid in Glasgow to recover the Leonardo da Vinci stolen from Drumlanrig Castle, have now been charged in a Scottish court.

IT was the first war painting by a Scottish artist to be exhibited in Scotland and was extensively discussed in the Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers of January 1941.

The auction of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection of Russian art was dramatically cancelled the day before the sale following an offer from a Russian businessman for the entire collection.