Previous Posts: November 2014

Thrilled to hear about the catalogue: if anyone decided to put on a show of 18thc French portraits, he would emerge as a real star.  Come to think of it, why hasn't there been one; I think people would be surprised how consistently good the works would be from the epochs of Rigaud to David. And, as your other recent post shows, the portrait sculpture was exceptional.

 One other thought per the recent dicsussions around the National's new Wilkie.  The Perronneau of Cazotte, which is a masterpiece, was bought by the Gallery at public auction in 1976 - for £88,000 I recall -  and is only one example of the practice of the then Director, Michael Levey, to bring in to the collection, and thereby for the public in this country overall, works by unfamiliar but important artists.  

It remains the only Perronneau painting in UK collections: PCF list 132 works by Wilkie.

Just why is it that the moment it’s time to flog antiques or artworks, auction houses grab the nearest “young filly” (likely an employee who has better things to do). Are we really happy to patronise buyers by suggesting their wallets will magically open at the sight of a pretty girl? The poor women in these prehistoric auction house pictures look out of place – and I bet they feel it. 

How do I know? I used to be one of them.

Before becoming a journalist, I worked in the press office of a leading London auction house. It was a desk job – my first. Yet, time and again I was dragged off to pose alongside various artefacts. Who’s that grinning inanely at a Francis Bacon triptych? Me. Pretending to drive Hitler’s 1939 Auto Union D-Type car, worth upwards of £6 million? Guilty. That figure wearing a Stormtrooper helmet from the first Star Wars film looks familiar. Me again. […]

Posing in front of the camera like a mannequin, it was hard not to feel like the blue-blooded equivalent of the bikini-clad lovelies who parade the ring between rounds at a big fight.

Now, I look at the young women in such sales pictures and cringe. They represent an outdated, old boys’ club – the very image that many of our most prestigious auction houses have gone to great lengths to ditch. 

This is the most shameless example I've seen:

Also this recent one amused as the girl's reflection in the glass means she appears in the picture twice as often as Rembrandt does"

That might be a perfectly innocent one where they wanted someone looking at the picture but it's never usually an old lady and I suppose in that respect it's no different from most other PR managed images we see. Images of young women are used to promote most things because it sells but perhaps it just looks more ridiculous with art because the artwork itself is supposed to be the visually stimulating image.

Not that important but I thought an insider view point might be an interesting Friday distraction and you do always bang on about "the girl in the press photo"!

In my experience the decision to use a young girl is usually never anything to do with the ‘auction house’ or the specialist department of the item in question. Unfortunately most auction house specialists don’t have enough time to dedicate a whole morning to taking copious amounts of press shots from slightly different angles with overly enthusiastic photographers. Nor is there some sort of misogynistic board of chairmen with nothing more pressing to do than demand a young girl is used for the shoot.

Usually the press office is responsible for  the model and usually it will be the youngest employee or intern in the department willing to do what the elders don't have time for. Invariably they are not only young but female as the pr industry seems to female heavy...or at least It is at our auction house as I have never met a bloke working in our pr team in my years!

If anyone does demand anything at all its usually the photographer. Usually free-lance/external anyway, they are often more used to shooting z-list celebrities and therefore think a young lady or a pair of white gloves will make a painting as ‘cool’ to the tabloid readership.

A long-lost avant garde painting has returned home to Hungary after nine decades thanks to a sharp-eyed art historian who spotted it being used as a prop in the Hollywood film Stuart Little.

In 2009, Gergely Barki, a researcher at Hungary’s national gallery, noticed Sleeping Lady with Black Vase by Robert Bereny in the 1999 children’s movie about a mouse as he watched TV with his daughter Lola.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Bereny’s long-lost masterpiece on the wall behind Hugh Laurie. I nearly dropped Lola from my lap,” Barki, 43, said.

“A researcher can never take his eyes off the job, even when watching Christmas movies at home.” The painting disappeared in the 1920s, but Barki recognised it immediately even though he had only seen a faded black-and-white photo dating from a 1928 exhibition.

He sent a flurry of emails to staff at the film’s makers, Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, and received a reply from a former set designer – two years later.

“She said the picture was hanging on her wall,” Barki said.

He laments the neglect of drawing in recent art education. ‘People had been drawing for 40,000 years, and they gave it up in 1975. It’s almost funny. But they couldn’t give it up really. You can’t: it’s always back to the drawing board!’ By that, he means that any new way of seeing the world will have to be produced by the human eye, heart and hand, working together. And this applies as much to new types of photographic imagery as it does to paintings.

The Cumberland Art Gallery – named after the Georgian prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, for whom in the 1730s William Kent created the suite of palace rooms where the superbly lit and sensitively selected new gallery has now been installed – is the Royal Collection’s latest attempt to display its art to us, the public. It is like looking into the Queen’s jewel box. This is a much more convincing royal art space than the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, which always feels like a liveried adjunct to the royal tourist industry and has never succeeded in competing with London’s big museums – its exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings a few years ago, for instance, drew nothing like the attention the National Gallery’s Leonardo show got. [...]

Curator Brett Dolman says the thinking behind the new gallery was precisely to free the art from “heritage”. Paintings by artists as lofty as Rubens can be seen all over this palace, as part of its decor or even as props in tableaux of royal splendour.

“We’re aware that when you hang paintings in that way you sometimes can’t get near to the art,” he concedes. So the new gallery “is where art speaks for itself”.

It does so absorbingly in what amounts to a permanent gallery of some of the Queen’s very best paintings. The Rembrandt is stupendous. Admittedly the Queen has some other mighty Rembrandts that are not on view here, as well as a drop-dead Vermeer. But there are enough splendours of Renaissance and Baroque painting to satisfy anyone. Two Caravaggios reveal the opposing sides of his vision – a boy peels fruit in one of his early sensual works while Jesus calls his disciples to him in a sombre Christian scene. I was more moved however by a painting of St Jerome looking downward with deep introspective eyes by the 17th-century French master of light Georges de la Tour.

This Gallery sounds magnificent. I can't wait to go and am especially pleased to see Watts's Lady Holland on view (it was cleaned for my exhibition Watts Portraits at the NPG  in 2004).

But, and this is a big but, it costs an eye-watering £17.05 to go (more if you pay on the door--£18.20) because it is included in admission to all of Hampton Court Palace.

Doesn't this raise the issue of the status of the paintings in the Royal Collection and just whose paintings they are?   I relish the masterpieces in the Royal Collection, admire its publications and value the expertise of its staff, so I certainly don't have an answer to this one. But many people might think twice about paying that much to go and see those wonderful paintings.

Just a thought on the Royal Collection hanging some of its gems at Hampton Court. Whilst this is good news, it does (as Jonathan Jones alludes) throw light on what is absent.

Ever since seeing Tim's Vermeer earlier in the year (silly concept but a decent film) I've wanted to see Vermeer's Music Lesson and yet because it usually hangs in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace I'm faced with having to await an honour or pay £20.50 to visit the state rooms in the summer. Why is this painting not on regular public show?

We're told that the Queen does not own the Royal Collection, she merely holds it in trust for the nation (and her successors). Well that's potentially a benign technicality as long as we have access to its treasures. But this is one of the world's great paintings (so I'm told) and it is hidden from most people, most of the time. Imagine if the National Gallery had a Vermeer that was in an upstairs room which you could only see when the Director invited you to or you had to pay £20 whilst he was on his summer holiday, what would the reaction be?

Yet with the Royal Collection this is accepted. The Music Lesson is not of a royal, it was not painted for a royal or to be hung in Buckingham Palace and as such there is no particular significance for it being there.

So if the Queen only holds it in trust for us, as she maintains, then could we see it please?

Amid all the glamorous Old Masters, nice to see Frank Holl’s grave and lovely picture prominently hung  - a seriously under-rated painter.

May I take up the baton and run ( or totter in my case) with it a while ?

It seems to me that your recent correspondents may have missed the fact that the Royal Collection is indeed a private collection and is funded entirely by admission charges ,and other revenue raising enterprises, and from time to time I dare say the Queen opens her handbag to help fund an acquisition as indeed, she has done on many occasions in the past. So far as I know, there is no public funding whatever.

The works of art on display are changed about and loaned to exhibitions all over the world  viz the Watts of Lady Holland; and I am told such loan requests are sanctioned by the Queen personally.

I am certain that the vast majority of the works of art ( let’s not forget the furniture, sculpture and applied arts) is on view at most times of the year, throughout the royal residences, with only a small percentage displayed in the private apartments. All such places are staffed and maintained all of which has to be paid for.

All of these factors make it a fairly pricey visit, and short of hanging “Sponsored by Honda “ flags outside Buckingham Palace; I can’t see how else they can continue to delight us.

In my opinion the British royal collection is better 'visible' and better studied than many museums in Your country or abroad.

I think to the wonderful catalogues of Castiglione drawings , 2013, or Italian Renaissance and Baroque pictures, 2007 for example...

And it's true they often loan very important pieces to scientific exhibitions.

I live in Italy, and I could see wonderful royal paintings loaned to the Carracci exhibition in Bologna, 2006, a beautiful Cagnacci in Forlì,  2008, a supposed Raphael portrait in Urbino, 2009, and also in 2003 the Duccio tryptich in Siena at the monographic show (the NG or the American museums didn't loan anything). I remember also a Mantegna 'triumph' in Paris in the 2008 big  exhbition.

So the RC has to be congratulated for the care but also for sharing the Queen treasures (and look at the web site!). Sure, it's expensive to visit the Residences, but also if you visit the Louvre or the Vatican museums....in Florence and Siena now we have to pay for visit churches! 

Bill Ruprecht, Sotheby’s chairman and chief executive, is to leave the auction house 13 months after activist investor Dan Loeb launched a blistering public campaign against his managerial style and demanded his resignation.

Sotheby’s said on Thursday that Mr Ruprecht was stepping down by mutual agreement with the board after 14 years at the helm. It added a search was under way for a successor and that Mr Ruprecht would remain in his role until a replacement was found.

Sotheby’s shares – which have fallen steadily since peaking at $53.51 in January – surged 7.4 per cent to $42.12 on the management shake-up in after-hours New York trading.

The atmosphere was extraordinary. Most observers could not believe that the painting would fetch £1 million. But the bidding, in an auction room that I had never seen so packed and tense, outflew all expectations. It started at £315,000, and took just 130 seconds. After reaching £1 million, the bidding did not slacken. If anything, it strengthened, and eventually shot past £2 million. It was finally knocked down for a staggering £2,310,000, almost tripling the previous world auction record for a painting. Even the most hardened dealers sitting in the audience breathed gasps of disbelief. Then there was a spontaneous burst of applause. The auctioneer left his rostrum, the painting was hastily removed, and sheer pandemonium broke out.

Scores of people swarmed around Alec Wildenstein, the 30-year-old dealer who had bought it. He had been sitting in the second row of the auction room and was escorted out by staff. But it took about ten minutes before a way could be found through the packed hall. He was visibly flushed, and at first seemed lost for words except to say that he was ‘very happy’. Then he managed to explain that the purchase realised the dream of his great-grandfather Nathan Wildenstein, who had founded the family firm 95 years before and thought this Pareja portrait was the greatest painting he had ever seen.

To be pedantic, the painting was knocked down for £2,200,000 guineas - those were the days!  For more detail, Agnews, who were one of the underbidders, provided an account in a book they published on their history.  And, to put ther price in context, one could have bought four of these [Van Goghs] for the same price at around the same time and probably a studio's worth of Rothkos.

It has to be said, as far as the saleroom is concerned, the work was exceptional - a undoubted masterpiece by one of the greatest artists who has ever lived, in great condition (unlined), and not on the market since the Regency period (it was owned by the Radnors).

Wildenstein's guff about his great-grandfather was just that, as he had been commissioned by the Met to buy it - against fierce competition from Washington, who still don't have a major Velasquez, and, it was said, The Louvre.

I too attended the sale of Juan de Pareja; and when I returned to Sotheby's where I was working at the time, I asked people to guess  what it had gone for. I had various offers of £250,000 and some. When I announced the figure; there was an audible sound of collective jaws dropping to the floor.

As a footnote; the final triumph was the discovery of some centimetres of painted canvas that had been folded over the right hand side, which when revealed, altered the balance of the composition to the left and to a state of perfection.

Just for comparative purposes the Velasquez sold for about £ 33 million in current prices based on the UK consumer price index.     probably around two thirds of its current value which would complete well with the inflated contemporary art values.

Curiously it is also 33 million dollars if one converted the original purchase price to dollars in 1970 when the pound was around $ 2.40 and applies the United States price index since 1970 but 66 million dollars if valued at British inflation rates.   

Old masters at the top of the market have risen faster than consumer prices in either country but have been outpaced recently by tulip bulbs….. err… contemporary art, the prices of which have less to do with the art than collecting and competition in general spiced with some greed and lots of guff.

[...] about £60 million today. Certainly, central London property prices have risen well in excess of 30x during the last 44 years, but that's another planet.

To be absolutely accurate, this was the first painting to exceed a million sterling at public auction.  It does remain remarkable that not only was the million pound ceiling broken through but the two million pound mark, but the point is that works could have, and indeed did, break the million pound limit in private sales some years before.

In 1967 the National Gallery of Art in Washington paid a reported $5 million for Leonardo’s Ginevra de’Benci – equivalent at the time to around £1.8 million.  More startlingly, in 1969 the Bavarian State Government – on behalf of the Munich Alte Pinakothek – paid a reported nearly £1.5 million for Hals’ full length portrait of Willem van Heythuysen.  Ironically, given they are now substantial collectors, both works came from among dispersals from the collections of the Princes of Liechtenstein.

The Velazquez was not only priciest, but politically a v. hot purchase (at a time when Harlem was very restive). Hoving had the painting, then in fabulous, scarcely ever touched, condition secretly spirited into Wildenstein’s lair until he found the best formulation for the Met’s spin on such a potentially dangerous purchase 

...and while there, he had it secretly restored so that no one every again got to see it in its fabulous condition...the shenanigans were recalled here.

A Young Woman Kneeling at a Prayer Desk was discovered in the USA after last being heard of in1872, when it was put up for sale by a relative of the 1st Earl Mulgrave. It is thought his daughter – Lady Augusta Phipps, who died in 1813 aged just 12 – is the subject of the painting.

The work was known to exist because it had featured in an oil sketch Display of Eight Paintings that the artist sent to his brother, Captain Wilkie, an army officer in India.

It was London-based art dealer Ben Elwes who recognised the painting as a Wilkie when he saw it in the catalogue for a sale in New York. He says “I know the work of Wilkie very well and I could see straight away that this was a painting of very great quality. It was tremendously exciting to make this discovery.”

The National Gallery is able to purchase A Young Woman Kneeling at a Prayer Desk thanks to Marcia Lay – an art teacher who taught at Lordswood Girls School, Harborne, for more than 20 years. She died in June 2012, leaving a generous gift in her Will to the National Gallery, and this will fully fund the purchase of the painting in what is Legacy Awareness Month.  Culture Minister Ed Vaizey said “This acquisition is a fantastic example of legacy giving and one that I hope will inspire others to do the same. Thanks to the wonderful generosity of Marcia Lay, an art teacher, this beautiful painting will be seen and enjoyed by a huge audience for the first time, so helping to ensure that her name – and her gesture - is celebrated for generations to come.”

The Wilkie is nice but I don’t think it’s outstanding enough for the National, nor can I believe Wilkie could ever have been a priority for them in filling gaps.

This is hardly a National Gallery-level picture. Regional museum at best. And on top of their recent acquisition of Lawrence's Portrait of Emily Lamb, which is the sort of thing you'd find in a Christie's or Sotheby's Day Sale. What's happening with the NG's quality control?

[...]though, for the life of me, I can't see where the Wilkie fit in [...]

I think your two recent commentators are being rather snobbish about the National Gallery’s very recent acquisition of the David Wilkie portrait.   Certainly, the Louvre did not think they were making an acquisition only suitable for a “Provincial” collection when they bought Wilkie’s portrait of his Parents in 2012. ( ref: Latribunedelart )  They, just like the NG, obviously thought he is a painter of international interest and worth, and the quality of the NG’s new “Portrait of a Young Woman kneeling at a Prayer Desk” is patently obvious.  I wonder if such distain would be shown by your commentators if the portrait was by a contemporary French artist ( say Isabey, Baron Gerard or a Troubadour-style Ingres ) rather than a Scottish artist?!

The Lawrence portrait of “Emily Mary Lamb” was an Acceptance in Lieu so the National Gallery paid nothing for this example of the artist’s fluent sketch portrait.  And the Wilkie fits easily into the NG’s Acquisition Policy of 2012, which details “Developing the canon” especially in eighteenth and nineteenth century painting, and Criteria 2: Narrative significance—does the painting enhance the way the National Gallery tells the story of art?

Both the Lawrence and the Wilkie fit the policy, albeit with small scale examples: and they are likely to remain on view amongst the grander British paintings in the collection.  Much more shocking, in my opinion, is why Tate Britain is unable or unwilling to display more of its rich and deep collection of historic British painting and still insists in giving over too much space to contemporary art?

I'm appalled that you've provided a stage for [the second comment above].

This person must be very grand to be able to pooh-pooh the taste and knowledge of the talented curators of the National Gallery. Emily Lamb is a beautiful portrait by one of this nation's greatest artists, of an important and interesting sitter, and it would certainly have been deemed "Evening Sale" material -- I know, because I was privy to its valuation during negotiations, and -- more practically -- I have foreign clients who would have paid through the nose if it could have been exported. It is a blessing to everyone that it has wound up on the Gallery's walls.

More importantly, someone should point out that given the piteous undervaluing of Old Masters as a field in general, the Day Sales at both Christie's and Sotheby's are often full of museum-quality pictures, for example the impeccably-preserved cover lot by Lemoyne at Christie's, or the fascinating Jan Boeckhorst at Sotheby's. Your contributor should look at all these works -- and the Wilkie, for that matter -- with more attention, and ask himself why all of the above artists are not better known to the lay public, rather than making the sort of snobbish and arrogant claims which are the armour of the secret intellectual insecurities of a pseudo-connoisseur. If museums do not display works by Lawrence, Wilkie, Lemoyne, Boeckhorst and other long-unfashionable or unrecognised artists, then they fail in their function, which is (at least in part) to deepen and broaden the public knowledge of the history of art, and its appreciation of all sorts of different real artistry -- an appreciation which should be the empirical bedrock of how we judge a work of art. The truth is that if Wilkie had even a fraction of the layman's celebrity that he deserves, this self-appointed critic would not dare to denigrate the acquisition. He does not realise that; the National Gallery curators do, and kudos to them.

I will refrain from sinking my teeth into the other moronic implication of this comment -- that it is acceptable or expected for regional museums to be second rate simply because they're further away from HIS address -- or perhaps because their visitors, poor hapless country rubes that they are, suffer from being less sophisticated than your omniscient, urbane, self-contented interlocutor?

Maybe it's the exhaustion talking -- I always enjoy reading this stuff but have never before been moved to write in. But that comment just gets my goat. What a twit.

Ps, WT* is that NG Wilkie all about? Day sale mediocrity indeed.

You have recently highlighted the recent purchase of Wilkie's Young Woman Kneeling at a Prayer Desk and appeal to buy a new frame for one of their Titians.

I don't know the terms of Marcia Lay's bequest, and we should be grateful for any such generosity, but do these examples really represent the level of ambition we should aspire to for our National Collection? As far as I'm aware, they have not had a public appear for a painting since 2009. At the moment there is an export block on a wonderful early Italian painting by Giovanni da Rimini, that is one of a tiny number pre-renaissance Riminese paintings in the UK. The National has only a single work from this school, from the time when Italy was developing concepts that would define Western art until the 19th century. A beautiful Bruegel and one on Stubbs' most notable non-equine pictures were sold at the same time and will doubtless be up for export shortly. If the National Gallery isn't going to make an effort to save even one of these, what are they there for? It is hard work raising money for artworks, but it has begun to feel as though the National Gallery, as with the British Museum, has decided it can no longer be bothered even to try.

Wouldn’t you say this was a posthumous portrait done to memorialise the deceased daughter?  Using her clothes and maybe a miniature or drawing likeness, and staged by Wilkie to maximise the idea of a child ‘gone to heaven’.

It’s been very interesting reading the debate on the NG’s new Wilkie acquisition. I went to see it on Friday evening and liked it a lot (more than expected after the first couple of comments on the post). It looks beautifully painted and (though I’m far from an expert) in good condition.

The main issue is that it’s on display in Room 34, right next to Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons and two along from Hogarth’s Graham Children. As such, it (and Lawrence’s Emily Mary Lamb) are completely dwarfed in scale. This is made even more pronounced by the sheer size of Room 34 itself. I’d have thought it would have been far better to hang them both in Room 35 (together with Mr and Mrs Andrews and Hogarth’s “Shrimp Girl”), which would much better suit their more intimate scale.

The reader who writes about the plight of the Rimini panel currently at risk of going abroad hits the nail squarely on its head.  Nine out of 11 export stopped paintings eventually went abroad last year and the National Gallery, to my knowledge, did not campaign for a single one.  I would like someone from the Gallery to explain why the Wilkie painting enables them to tell a better story of the development of Western art as compared to what would have been possible should any of the major paintings by Le Brun, Cropsey, Puligo or Coello have been acquired.  The Rimini Panel should be subject to an all guns blazing appeal given its rarity, beauty and provenance and it’s disappointing (but not surprising) that so far we hear nothing from those who could make a difference.

Just on the question of prices for the Lawrence “Mary Lamb” portrait and the Wilkie.  The 2010-12 Acceptance in Lieu Report Appendix confirms that 472,500GBP was settled for the Lawrence and, according to the “Herald” the NG paid 200,000GBP for the Wilkie.

What is more snobbish (or Twit-ish); daring to express a view on the quality or not of a painting, or saying we must all slavishly follow the views of art dealers and museum curators, just because the former group sold it to the latter?

I have to confess that I like the old frame.  It may just be that the 2  photographs differ slightly but the reddish gold on the new frame cancels out the red in the skin tones of the portraits and makes the painting look dull in comparison to when the picture was in the earlier frame.  It looks like a waste of money  but I'm sure it will brighten the overall decorative effect in the room, even if it 'kills' the painting!

The Pazzi Chapel is a landmark of Renaissance architecture in Florence, Italy. Located in the Santa Croce church complex, the structure was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi – the master architect who is most famous for engineering Florence’s beloved cathedral dome. The loggia in front of the Pazzi Chapel is a prime example of 15th-century architectural decoration in grey pietra serena sandstone, colourful maiolica and terracotta.

550 years have taken their toll on this structure and its decoration. The loggia of the Pazzi Chapel requires urgent restoration to stop further deterioration. Opera di Santa Croce, the non-profit institution in charge of the church’s administration, has raised 50% of the funds needed to carry out this restoration, slated to begin in early 2015. Your support of the loggia’s restoration will help to raise the remaining amount. In so doing, you will become part of the 720-year-long history of Santa Croce.

[...] my wife and I exchanged new wedding rings in the Pazzi chapel, all by ourselves, twenty years ago.  There is no more moving space, even if there are equally beautiful ones, which speaks to the Pazzi Chapel's architectural perfection.

Well, I am with you half-way. For grand rooms, yes the old-fashioned hang could be a good way to see more art out of storage and even kind of fun (doesn't the Wallace in London do this, now?). But could we have as well smaller rooms where selected pieces are presented in some semblance of their original settings, such as altarpieces on plain altar-like structures and rooms with domestic art furnishings?  I expect this is anathema to curators (or am I wrong?), but what about the rest of us?

Nice photo from the Prado in days of old.

I wonder if it worth starting an on-line petition to get the Tate Britain Duveen Galleries rehung to the maximum? A grand 18/19th Century Royal Academy-style hanging.

The Art Fund arrange projects through crowdfunding these days.

When reading about the proposal to hang arrange the pictures "old-style", i disliked the notion at first.

But then I remembered my visit to Madrid's Sorolla museum. I fondly remember it as being one of my favourite museums, with quite an intimate atmosphere.

The walls are filled with sorolla works from bottom to top.

I'd be curious to see some modern museums attempt it. Altough it may be more suitable for a wood-furnished artist's atelier than for a stark white museum hallway. (since many museums nowadays resemble nothing more than a collection of corridors).

I agree with you, I would rather have more on display and less wall space, which leads me to dwell on the color of the wall rather than the art.

We are fortunate to have a small gem of a museum in Seattle, The Frye Museum.  The Frye Museum along with contemporary exhibitions displays the original 232 paintings purchased by Charles and Emma Frye and left to the city for all to enjoy, and we do.