Fine Art

A DEALER in antique prints has complained to eBay that the promotion of reproduction prints in the antiques category is slowly destroying the online market for originals.

“There was a certain amount of watching. People were there to see what was happening, which was why it was slightly less active than last year, particularly for the nice, but less fashionable 19th century watercolours.”

A new world auction record for Sir Joshua Reynolds was achieved at Sotheby’s on November 29 when the oil on canvas Portrait of Omai sold for £9,400,500 (plus 20/15/10 per cent buyer’s premium).

Vermeer’s Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces by Philip Steadman, published by the Oxford University Press. ISBN 019215967 £17.99hb

One of the advantages of being an auction house with offices and salerooms spread around the country is that items with regional associations can be sold in the areas with the relevant local interest. This is precisely what happened on November 8 when the signed Louise Rayner (1832-1924) watercolour that had originally been consigned to Phillips Bath came up for sale 120 miles and one corporate take-over away at Bonhams Chester (15/10% buyer’s premium).

PORTRAIT miniatures are one field that has been performing strongly in recent seasons, an area of the market where the private buyer is very much in evidence.

ARTS Minister Tessa Blackstone has placed a temporary bar on the export of an important drawing, Study for the Institution of the Eucharist, by Federico Barocci (1528-1612).

USA: Mixed signals emerged from New York’s crucial November round of Part I Impressionist and Modern sales, the most significant test of the international art market since September 11.

USA: Swann Galleries will hold their inaugural auction of Contemporary Art on the evening of Tuesday, November 13 at their 104 East 25th Street New York premises. The sale comprises about 170 examples of photo-based artworks, paintings, prints and drawings as well as mixed media pieces and multiples by late 20th century artists.

THIS year’s annual International Fine Print Dealers Association Print Fair, scheduled for October 31 to November 4, has been cancelled with the forced closure of the Seventh Regiment Armory to non-military activities.

The rediscovery of a significant work by a major Old Master painter is always an event for the art trade, even if the work not obviously commercial. When Anthony Blunt wrote his monograph on Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) this painting, right, of The Holy Family with St. John the Baptist, executed c.1627-28 when the young Poussin first worked in Rome, was only known from engravings.

IN May 1967 Caroline Lumley and Camilla Cazalet quickly began establishing Lumley Cazalet (33 Davies Street, W1K 4LR. Tel: 020 7491 4767) as leading specialists in late 19th and 20th century prints, with an emphasis on the French School.

It’s a case of two days only with Ryan Fine Art’s (74 Vanbrugh Park, Blackheath, SE3 7JQ. Tel: 020 8293 5300) exhibition of over 80 Victorian and European oils, watercolours and prints.

COPENHAGEN: Combining the current commercial attractions of Denmark’s so-called Golden Age painters of the early 19th century with plein air oil sketches by artists made in Italy during the same period, an intriguing group of small canvases by three, albeit relatively minor Danish Golden Age artists sketching in Italy proved to be a predictably desirable target on the second day of Bruun Rasmussen’s (25% buyer’s premium) September 3-5 sale in Copenhagen.

Scottish painting is, as we know, one of the stronger sectors of the UK art market, but William Page Atkinson Wells (1872-1923) is not one of its better known names.

DENMARK: IN September last year, Copenhagen auctioneers Museumsbygningen (25% buyer’s premium) created a stir by achieving DKr1,000,000 (£85,470) for an oil study of a nude by Wilhelm Marstrand (1810-1873) dating from January 3, 1833, the day on which Professor C.F. Eckersberg and five pupils made the first ever paintings of a female life model at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

A ‘LOST’ painting by the great 17th century French painter Nicolas Poussin has come to light and will be offered for sale by Galerie Koller in Zurich on October 5.

Members of the trade still looking for a suitable holiday destination could do worse than consider Pirate’s Cove on Cocos Island, the subject of this Montague Dawson oil on canvas, 3ft 4in by 4ft 2in, which appeared at Christie’s Maritime sale in New York on July 31.

One of the great names of 17th-century Spanish still life painting is undoubtedly that of Juan van der Hamen, whose brief career as a court painter in Madrid spanned the decade of the 1620s.