Museums and Institutions

A NEW code of conduct has been agreed to offer standard guidelines for locating and unearthing treasure trove.

LESS than two months remains to find the final £116,057 towards the £1.4m price of a unique portrait of the 17th century poet John Donne.

A THIEF who used a key to get into a display cabinet and avoided being filmed on CCTV has made off with two unusual artefacts from a museum in Surrey.

The UK’s leading art charity has commissioned its first-ever work by a contemporary artist as part of a campaign to boost funding for the arts.

A magnificent Charles II silver fluted fruit sideboard dish saved from export in 2005 is now on display at the Royal College of Physicians. It will be displayed alongside their existing collection of memorabilia relating to Sir Francis Prujean, the President of the Royal College of Physicians (1650-1654) whose life-saving cures were recorded in Pepys’ diaries.

This medieval bronze jug was the talking point of Sotheby’s sale of the contents of Easton Neston last year when it was bought by London dealer Daniel Katz for a premium-inclusive £568,000 against expectations of £60,00-80,000. The rare jug is cast with a slew of insignia including the Royal arms as used between 1340 and 1405, a maker’s mark and the inscription To My Lord Wenlok.

A LOOPHOLE in the export law has forced the British Museum to pay almost £100,000 more than the original auction price for the most expensive British coin ever sold. The museum believes the case highlights the need for Britain’s laws on exporting art to be reconsidered.

The Victoria & Albert Museum’s sculpture collection will be redisplayed this spring in the new Dorothy and Michael Hintze Galleries.

Next month the Royal Observatory, Greenwich will unveil four new galleries designed to tell the story of precision timekeeping.

A funding package worth £7m has been agreed allowing construction to begin on a new Wedgwood Museum in the heart of the Potteries at the company’s Barlaston headquarters.

There will be a rare chance to glimpse some of the long unseen areas of Beijing’s Forbidden City on November 28, when Henry Tzu Ng of the World Monuments Fund will deliver a lecture at the Royal Academy in conjunction with their forthcoming exhibition – China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795.

With perfect timing in advance of the forthcoming biopic starring Renee Zellweger as Beatrix Potter, the lecture at this year’s AGM of the British Antique Furniture Restorer’s Association was entitled Beatrix Potter – A Pioneer in Regional Furniture Discovery.

LAPADA will launch a new London flagship fair next year when LAPADA@TheRoyalAcademy opens from May 4 to 7 at the Royal Academy.

LAW Fine Art could hardly have timed their latest sale better: a collection of Cotswolds Arts and Crafts with primary provenance by leading practitioners Barnsley, Gimson and Lethaby to be sold on April 5.

Running alongside the Italian Renaissance Galleries in the V&A are the museum’s three original refreshment rooms dating from the 1860s.

FAMOUS West End department store Heal’s is the sponsor of the V&A’s major spring exhibition, International Arts and Crafts, which will be held at the museum in South Kensington from March 17 to 24.

THE memory of a long-ago, short-lived trade agreement between England and France was rekindled by an extraordinary embroidered waistcoat that surfaced in the Deburaux & Associés sale in Paris on February 11, when it sold to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich for €5000 (£3470) plus 20.33% buyer’s premium.

Franz Xavier Messerschmidt (1736-83) was one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of Western art.

The £1.7m price tag needed to keep the Macclesfield Psalter in the UK has been found.

FOR its seventh London staging, The Watercolours and Drawings Fair leaves its long-time home at the Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly, and moves deeper into Mayfair to The Royal Academy, 6 Burlington Gardens, W1 where it will run from February 3 to 6 with a charity preview on the evening of February 2.