Museums and Institutions

Islington Museum has issued a public plea to help it raise £20,000 to buy a screen collage by Joe Orton's lover and killer Kenneth Halliwell at auction later this month.

The director of the Victoria & Albert Museum is to step down this autumn after five years in the role.

With his trademark fez and deceptively shambolic stage persona, Tommy Cooper was one of Britain’s best known TV personalities. Now the Victoria & Albert Museum is acknowledging his fame and popularity with the announcement that they have acquired the comedian’s memorabilia collection.

A new exhibition at Oxford’s Bodleian Library examines how historical events appeared on stage in Regency Britain.

The Tate has acquired a major portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) from Castle Howard in North Yorkshire after it was accepted in lieu of inheritance tax.

An impressive and richly decorated pair of early 17th century gilt bronze and pietre dura inlaid Italian cabinets, which stood in Castle Howard, Yorkshire for two and a half centuries, have been saved for the Nation by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The V&A have acquired an early form by the artist-potter Hans Coper (1920-81). Made in 1955 in the studio Coper shared with Lucie Rie in Paddington, London, the large bowl was the subject of a temporary export ban in 2015 in the hope a UK buyer could be found.

Asian Art in London, the annual festival celebrating art and antiques from Asia, has been nominated for a national business award against stiff competition.

How much would 700 chickens, 2000 of the finest fish or 11,000 pints of beer cost you these days? A hoard of 1857 Roman coins discovered in the north of England would buy any of those options.

The triumphal portrait of Elizabeth I has become public property with the help of a Heritage Lottery Fund grant and £1.5m pounds raised in public donations.

Without computers, virtual reality was a very different concept 200 years ago. Clever use of optics and illusion was the key, as a paper peepshow collection given to London’s Victoria and Albert Museums demonstrates beautifully.

The Bowes Museum has secured funding at a sum of nearly £2.3m to keep an exit-barred painting attributed to the workshop of Dieric Bouts the Elder in the UK.

The Roemer and Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim has had to close a major exhibition after collectors withdrew their loans following the approval of Germany’s new Cultural Property Protection Act.

Phillips are hosting an exhibition of late works by Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) in collaboration with the Hepworth Wakefield.

Two finely carved marble figures of mourners from the tomb of Jean de France, the duc de Berry (1340-1416) brother of King Charles V of France were secured by the Louvre for €4.4m (£3.67m) at Christie’s Paris last week.

Sacha Llewellyn is a co-founder of Liss Llewellyn Fine Art, which specialises in reappraising under-represented artists of the past.

Royal Museums Greenwich are attempting to raise £10m to buy a version of The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I. The work currently belongs to descendants of Sir Francis Drake but the institution say that unless the required funds are raised, the painting “could be sold on the open market and even go overseas”.

Two landscapes by 19th century European artists have been donated to the National Gallery by Asbjørn Lunde, an American of Norwegian extraction who is one of the world’s top collectors in the field.

Christie’s are to sell another major slice of deaccessioned material from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, just under a year after they held a dedicated auction devoted to a dispersal from the Met’s holdings of English furniture and works of art.

Oxford’s Bodleian Library has acquired a map of Middle-earth annotated by JRR Tolkien (1892-1973).