Fine Art

THE Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a devotional panel of the Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278; died 1319) from the Stoclet family in Brussels.

A NEW auction house has opened in London’s West End focusing on Russian art, one of the fastest growing sectors of the world art market.

THE market for Contemporary art maintained its seemingly unstoppable momentum in New York last week.

NERVES in New York’s art market, just like those in the New York stock market, were settled by the swift resolution of the US presidential election.

THE V&A have opened the first new gallery in their £30m transformation programme.

THERE are few more commercial subjects than children. Accordingly, it was no surprise that this near life-size Italian marble group of two children playing on a balcony (pictured right) by Donato Barcaglia, dating from the late 19th century stole the limelight at Christie’s King Street (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) 19th century furniture, sculpture, works of art and ceramics sale on September 30.

JACK Vettriano (b.1951) is not an artist normally associated with the North East of England, but one of the lesser known facts about Britain’s Most Popular Artist is that one of his first one-man exhibitions, if not the first, was held at the Corrymella Scott Gallery in Jesmond, an upmarket suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne, in 1992.

AT 10.41 on the morning of August 25, 1875, to the sounds of Rule Britannia, Captain Matthew Webb emerged from the cold and choppy waters of the Channel. It had taken him 21 hours and 41 minutes. He had covered close to 40 miles. But he had become the first man to swim from English to French soil.

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 Mira Jacob Collection sale at Bailly-Pommery-Voutier & Sotheby's (23.92 - 14.35% buyer's premium) included a smattering of drawings and watercolours by artists outside the dealer’s sphere of influence – from a small Picasso ink sketch of a Glass and Jar, bought in at €44,000, to a Degas pencil portrait of Thérèse Degas, 11 x 8 1/2in (28 x 22cm), which sold at a quadruple-estimate €77,000 (£52,400).

DELVAUX and Redon were among eight artists granted solo exhibitions at Jacob’s Bateau Lavoir gallery in Rue de Seine between 1960 and 1986, along with James Ensor, Charles Filiger, Bernadette Kelly, Pierre Klossowski, Marie Laurencin, and Paul Wunderlich – all represented at Bailly-Pommery-Voutier & Sotheby's (23.92 - 14.35% buyer's premium), notably Filiger with 13 lots, and Ensor with eight.

DAY two of the sale of the Mira Jacob Collection, held by Bailly-Pommery-Voutier & Sotheby’s (23.92 - 14.35% buyer's premium), was devoted to prints and illustrated books and yielded €780,000 (£530,000) with all but seven of the 166 lots selling.

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.

THE chronicles of Captain Cook and his perils on the high seas of the South Pacific, possess a mixture of action, adventure, discovery, science and romance that is enough to capture the most hardened imagination.

SOME canny detective work by both the auctioneer and the buyer seems to have come up with answers to most of the questions surrounding this intriguing unsigned mid-19th century miniature on ivory, right, offered by Neales (15% buyer’s premium) of Notttingham on September 9. The 4 x 3in (10 x 7.5cm) miniature, presented in its original Victorian frame in a glazed easel display case, had been entered by a private vendor who had no idea of either sitter or artist.

SUSPICION that the market for Irish pictures, at least on this side of the Irish Sea, might be in a softer state than it was three or four years ago, were dramatically dispelled at the Guildford rooms of Clarke Gammon Weller (15% buyer’s premium) on September 7 when a rather late, but completely fresh-to-market, canvas by Paul Henry (1876-1958) was offered.

COMMISSIONED in 1908 by the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Co., Mists of Yellowstone, one of many pictures of what is now the Yellowstone National Park region painted by Thomas Moran, nearly doubled the previous saleroom best for the artist on July 29. It made $4.4m (£2.42m) in the grand ballroom of the Silver Legacy Resort & Casino in Reno, Nevada – where Coeur d’Alene Art hold an annual auction, the big event of the year for well-heeled lovers of Western art.

PICTURED right is one of Nicolaas Johannes Roosenboom’s (1805-1880) classic winter landscapes, The Pleasure Trip: Elegant figures on Ice, which made €9000 (£6000) at Christie’s Amsterdam (23.205/11.9% buyer’s premium) Pictures Watercolours and Drawings sale on September 1. The signed oil on panel was 23in x 2ft 4in (58 x72cm).

AN Americana sale held by Eldreds of East Dennis on August 5-6 included a number of works by Ralph Eugene Cahoon Jr. (1910-82), a Cape Cod artist for whom mermaids and sailors, lighthouses and balloons were key themes, and the picture top right, a late addition to the catalogue, proved one of the Massachusetts sale’s greater successes, at $40,000 (£22,000).

SINCE its first appearance in 1994, Peter McEwan’s Dictionary of Scottish Art & Architecture has been an obligatory presence on the bookshelves of anyone with a serious interest in buying and/or selling Scottish art.