Museums and Institutions

UK: IT HAS just been announced exclusively to the Antiques Trade Gazette that the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum, which holds one of the most comprehensive collections of coins and medals in the world, has received a very substantial grant to update and rewrite the history of Greek coins from their invention (c.630BC) to Alexander the Great (d.323BC).

Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries by Avril Hart and Susan North, published by V&A Publications. ISBN 18517772588 £19.95 pb

After more than 30 years in storage, the Hereford Screen, one of the metalwork masterpieces of the Victorian age, has been conserved and returned to its former glory. Richly intricate and colourful, this Gothic Revival choir screen was made for Hereford Cathedral and will be unveiled at the V&A on Thursday, May 24.

UK: An ancient Celtic gold ornament provided the high point of Christie’s South Kensington’s Antiquities sale last week when it was purchased for £1m by London’s British Museum, to whom it was on loan from 1993 to 2000.

UK: THE Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge is celebrating a £425,000 Lottery windfall that has helped it acquire a stunning coin collection.

Letters, manuscripts and photographs from many of Britain’s most celebrated artists are to form a new art research library that will be open to the public at Tate Britain.

Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum, by Amin Jaffer

UK: THE V&A have announced that they are to open their new British Galleries 1500-1900 on November 22.

TO commemorate the centenary of Queen Victoria’s death the V&A’s major spring exhibition is Inventing New Britain: The Victorian Vision, from April 5 to July 29. Co-curated by Paul Atterbury, the exhibition takes as its themes how a modern Britain emerged during the Queen’s all-powerful reign, and the way in which the Victorians have shaped our lives. Three books have been published by V&A Publications to accompany the exhibition.

LONDON: DESPITE there being no official announcement from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the papers have been full of the news that Mark Jones is to be the new director of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

THE Art-Law Centre of Switzerland is holding an international symposium, entitled Claims for the Restitution of Looted Art, at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva on November 10.

UK: THE Saatchi Gallery is to distribute 39 works of Contemporary Art by British artists among seven regional galleries and museums.

AS THE Tour de France came to an end, this 1870 Eugène Meyer de Paris Vélocipède sold on its top estimate for £26,000 (plus 15 per cent buyer’s premium) at Brooks’ Summer Vintage sale at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu on July 27.

THE second week of London’s prestige midsummer sales saw the Modern given way to the traditional with a flurry of exceptional prices for Old Master paintings and drawings and Renaissance works of art.

UK: THE panel looking into whether UK collections and institutions should return Nazi looted art to its original owners or compensate them has unveiled the criteria and procedures which will determine its judgements.

US: ONE OF the rarest chairs in the world has met with an unexpected fate at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. A 17th century Chinese folding armchair, which had accomodated the highest dignitaries of the Imperial court, was unable to bear the weight of a weary museum visitor who had disregarded the ‘do not touch’ sign and sat down to rest his feet.

US & FRANCE: TWO works by Philippe de Champaigne have been withdrawn from the sale of the Karl Lagerfeld collection, in New York on May 23, and offered to the French State.

UK: LEADING London art dealer Simon Dickinson has announced the sale to the Brooklyn Museum of Art of the 14th century Florentine gold ground painting of Christ in Majesty which he bought for £66,000 at Dorchester rooms of Hy. Duke & Son on March 9

UK: LADY Charlotte Schreiber was a celebrated 19th century collector numbering ceramics, enamels and fans amongst her passions.

UK: ONE of the bargains of the year must be the British Library’s purchase of the Letters of the Earl of Essex to Elizabeth I, which sold at Phillips on June 11 for a low-estimate £150,000 plus premium.