Museums and Institutions

The National Gallery has taken ownership of three pictures by 18th century greats Jean-Etienne Liotard, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence.

The Bodleian Library has added an unusual piece of culinary history to its collection.

A harpsichord that was sold at The Canterbury Auction Galleries in 2018 to a US buyer and later barred from export by the government has been saved for the nation by Gainsborough’s House museum.

LAPADA launches a webinar series this week with a conversation between the association’s CEO Freya Simms and Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

A group of Mesopotamian antiquities destined for collectors in the UK was discovered to be fake and seized in an operation by Border Force and the British Museum.

Two collectors of British studio pottery have bequeathed 100 pieces from their personal collection to The Hepworth Wakefield gallery in Yorkshire.

A Vincent Van Gogh painting from the early part of the artist’s career has been stolen from a museum in the Netherlands.

The number of items deemed to be Treasure and found by the UK public has hit a record high, according to new figures from the British Museum.

Three Old Master paintings, including Annibale Carracci’s A Boy Drinking, have been stolen from a museum in Oxford.

A well-preserved 3000-year-old Bronze age gold sun pendant, known as a bulla, has been bought by the British Museum after it was found by a metal detectorist in Shropshire in 2018.

A sixteenth century double-handled maiolica albarello, bought by Mayfair dealer Sam Fogg in 2014, has been acquired by the British Museum.

A new museum in Plymouth has acquired a ‘colossal and extraordinary grotesque grinning crab’ by the Martin Brothers after fundraising to keep the sculpture in the UK.

An Afghan limestone sculpture believed to have been stolen during the Afghan civil war (1992-94), when Kabul was besieged, surfaced at an auction house in the UK last year.

The UK government is seeking a buyer to pay £2.5m for a group of 18th century botanical drawings.