Previous Posts: March 2025

Cristoforo de Predis at the Sforza Court - By Jeffrey Schrader

A portrait of an unknown woman by Titian - By Peter Humfrey and Paul Joannides

A Safavid ambassadress in Rome: the last testament of Teresa Sampsonia Shirley - By Alexandria Brown-Hedjazi

Additions to Ter Brugghen in Italy: ‘Christ bound to the column’ and ‘St John the Baptist in the wilderness’ - By John Gash

‘Two boys with a bladder’ in the J. Paul Getty Museum and Joseph Wright of Derby’s early candlelights - By Julia Siemon

Paul Sandby and Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn revisited - By Oliver Fairclough

Observations about the abandoned portrait beneath Gainsborough’s ‘Blue boy’ - By Christina Milton O'Connell

The 25cm-high bronze corpus has been priced at €1.8m (£1.5m). Stuart Lochhead Sculpture, the company behind the sales, is not giving any estimates on the price of the Velázquez, which was kept in a convent in Toledo until it came into the hands of a Madrid family in the 1940s.

In the first exhibition to be held in The Frick Collection’s new special exhibition galleries, three works by Johannes Vermeer will be presented from June 18 through September 8, 2025. The unprecedented installation Vermeer’s Love Letters centers on the Frick’s iconic Mistress and Maid, uniting it with two special loans: The Love Letter from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid from the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Presented together in a single gallery for the first time, this trio of works will offer visitors the opportunity to consider Vermeer’s exploration of themes of letter writing and epistolary exchange in the context of the seventeenth-century domestic settings for which the artist is renowned.

States Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, “On the heels of the museum’s public reopening on April 17, it is fitting that we are debuting our new special exhibition galleries with a closer look at the work of Vermeer, one of the most popular artists in our collection. His Mistress and Maid is the final masterpiece that Henry Clay Frick acquired before his death, making this inaugural show a particularly appropriate tribute to his legacy as a collector.”

This prominent private collection of around a hundred 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings has been assembled by the Kremers over the past 30 years. The loan will enhance Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar's offerings in 17th-century art and add greater urgency to the museum’s longstanding desire to expand its space. Until 1 June 2025, approximately 50 works from the collection will be on display at a temporary exhibition titled The Kremer Collection: A Shared Love.

“The Kremer Collection is one of today’s foremost private collections of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings”, says Marrigje Rikken, director of Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar. “It is fantastic that we may be able to present this internationally renowned collection, which includes an early Rembrandt, in Alkmaar for the foreseeable future. This will enable us to place our own collection in the context of national developments at the time and will thus be an important complement to our collection. In one fell swoop, Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar will join the ranks of Dutch museums with leading collections of 17th-century art.”

“We have been following Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar for some time”, George Kremer explains. “We are excited by its ambition and its expansion plans to enable it to serve a wider audience. It is partly for this reason that Ilone, Joël and I, after multiple conversations with each other and with the fantastic people who work at the museum, have decided to embark on a path that should lead to the long-term presentation of our collection at Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar. It has always been our mission to share the collection with as many people as possible, and to share the love and pleasure of each work we have bought together. We see that this mission ties in very well with the museum’s plans. We feel confident that this will increase the impact this beautiful museum aims to have in the region, in the Netherlands and beyond.”

 In the 500th year since Lorenzo Lotto’s departure from Bergamo, after 12 years of intense activity, the Carrara Academy celebrates the artist by exceptionally hosting the San Bernardino Altarpiece, a masterpiece from the church of the same name located just 500 meters from the museum, which is currently closed to the public. This is an itinerary that, in addition to celebrating the painter, will include an original photographic intervention by Axel Hütte, who will appropriate Lotto’s painting to tell its story through the contemporary language of photography.

One of the largest and most important art collections in the world, Royal Collection runs to more than a million objects, including 8000 paintings and 3000 miniatures. Spread among fifteen Royal residences and former residences across the UK, displayed at exhibitions at The King’s Galleries in London and Edinburgh and via loans, it is unique in both scale and variety.

As Senior Curator, you’ll play a key role in leading the Paintings team in all matters relating to the care, conservation, access, research, cataloguing and exhibiting of the paintings, miniatures and frames in the collection.

The bee is the popular figure of the 21st century. The major spring exhibition provides a comprehensive insight into the exciting history of the bee in art, from the Renaissance to the present day.

For the first time, this story is being told in an exhibition using top-class works of art. Never before has it been possible to experience the wide variety of roles played by the bee as vividly as in our exhibition. Surprising stories, instructive tales, philosophical ideas and astonishing allegories can be marveled at around this insect. Many of the stories are still touching today, because the bee has always been the inspiration for the visualization of general human feelings and ideals.

Belonging to the prestigious British collection of Jonathan Richardson senior (1665-1745), this delicate composition in a blond wash (highly characteristic of Nicolas Poussin’s drawings) of Sainte Catherine agenouillée entourée de putti et regardant une image pieuse depicts the kneeling Saint Catherine surrounded by putti and gazing at a sacred image (€60,000-80,000), while the object which caused her martyrdom, the wheel, is shown broken not far from her. This early drawing, probably produced in Rome between 1627 and 1630, is stylistically similar to a group of mythological scenes, also featuring putti, in the Musée de Condé in Chantilly, the Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Uffizi in Florence.  

In the age of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 – 1669), the biblical Book of Esther was a key source of inspiration for diverse communities in Holland, both Jewish and Christian. Traditionally, the Esther story is read annually on the Jewish holiday of Purim. For immigrant Jewish communities living with new freedom in more tolerant Amsterdam, celebrating Purim—notably through finely produced Esther scrolls and theater productions—became meaningful expressions of Jewish culture. For the Dutch, Queen Esther’s heroism came to represent their emerging nation’s identity. Rembrandt and his contemporaries depicted essential scenes of Esther’s story in paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts. This exhibition gives expression to this full range of the Book of Esther’s popularity and meaning in Rembrandt’s time.