Among the items to be loaned are Da Vinci's "La Belle Ferroniere" ("Portrait of an Unknown Woman") from the Louvre in Paris; Claude Monet's "Gare Saint-Lazare" from the Musee d'Orsay; a self-portrait by Van Gogh, also from the Musee d'Orsay; and Matisse's "Still Life With Magnolia" from the Centre Pompidou.

The Chateau de Versailles will be lending the famous "Napoleon Crossing the Alps" painting by Jacques-Louis David.

The only decorative cycle on public display in the UK by one of the most influential artists in the development of landscape painting and a key inspiration to the Impressionists, will remain on view for future generations to enjoy after being purchased by the National Gallery with the support of the Art Fund.

The Four Times of Day (about 1858), by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, has a long association with the UK. The four paintings, representing Morning (pictured left), Noon, Evening and Night, were acquired by artist Frederic, Lord Leighton in 1865 and were among the earliest Corot works to be acquired by a British collector. Lord Leighton displayed them as the focal point of his London home, where they provided inspiration for his fellow Victorian artists. After his death, the paintings spent more than a century in the same family collection and have been on loan to the National Gallery since 1997. The pictures were acquired for Lord Wantage at Christie’s in 1896 and their sale to the nation was negotiated by Christie’s.

Corot painted the four large panels, which trace the deepening light of the sky from sunrise to star-studded night, to decorate the Fontainebleau studio of his friend and fellow painter Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. He completed the cycle in a single week prompting Decamps to exclaim, 'Not so fast, don’t hurry so; there is still enough soup for a few days more.' Decamps apparently spent hours in contemplation of the panels, filled with dismay at their quality, technique and effect compared to his own work.

Another unnecessary acquisition.  They already have 21 Corots so why not have helped Leighton House get them back – the latter’s been buying back works from the Lord’s collection over the years.

I’ve found the lack of comment on the National Gallery’s Corot acquisition interesting. Does this mean that the vast majority of people deem it to be a good acquisition, I wonder? As compared to the Wilke, this (surely more significant) acquisition seems to have raised hardly a peep.

I’ve always liked the Four Times of Day, and am glad to see them in the permanent collection – they’re striking when viewed together, and they’re also varied, compared to a lot of other Corot landscapes with milky-white skies. I suppose there’s a debate to be had about whether the money would have been better spent on expanding the collection’s range (given they already have more than 20 Corots).

The paintings were originally owned by Mathilda Marks, an heiress to the Marks and Spencer empire, but were stolen by con men from the flat she shared with her American husband in Chester Terrace, near Regent's Park in London, in 1970.

The thieves smuggled the paintings by train through France, intending to enter Italy, but panicked while waiting to cross the border and left them on a train heading towards Turin.

They were found by railway inspectors and languished for years in a dusty lost property office before being put up for auction by Italy's national railway network in 1975.

The Fiat worker, who regularly attended the railway auctions as a hobby, bought the two masterpieces for 45,000 lire – just £19 in today's money.

Yes, but the estate would only go to the Crown (State) if the intestate was domiciled in England or Wales for which we do not have the facts.

It is strange to me that the insurers, would not have been considered the rightful owners if they had paid for the loss.

25 originals by European artists, including the Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor Lorenzo di Credi.

This is really sad but......  last year  at work we received shiny new Leonardo Dispensing Solutions loo roll holders.  Now my daughter is a facilities manager and gets highly excited about such things so I made a mental note to tell her.

After work a friend and I went to the cinema in the same city and visited the ladies before the film began. Imagine my excitement when I noticed that the same loo roll holders were there. But no - on closer examination, these holders were called.......   DA VINCI. 

I googled it for you and there's a whole world of products:       

Versatwin dispenser     

The Da Vinci versatwin toilet roll system is the smallest and most versatile toilet tissue system on offer. Its compact size and large capacity of 250 metres of paper makes it an attractive, neat and efficient solution for even the smallest washroom. The dispensers control usage by allowing access to only one roll at a time. Only when the first roll is depleted can the second be accessed. This allows for efficient replenishment and ensures that the product need never run out.£29.95 (inc VAT £35.94)   each

After a fairly dismal performance at the Frieze Masters fair in October, where few Old Masters paintings were sold, the Old Master market picked up its heels at the London auctions last week.

“My penis is an organ. I need it to reproduce, and for sex and joy... but I can also use it in my art, and that’s joyful for me on more levels.”

Jensen said he “painted” the portrait of Kardashian in about 8 to 10 hours. His natural gifts, he said, came in handy. "If one is ill-equipped, it is difficult to reproduce the small details,” he told the Copenhagen Post. “But if one is well-endowed, it is easier to produce a better painting."

“He thought that every advantage in civil society was compounded in women and wine: and, acting up to this principal of bliss, he gave his body to Euphrosyne, and his intellects to madness. He was as ostentatious as a peacock, and as amorous as the Persian Sophi; he would never stir abroad without his bag and his sword; and, when the beauties of Ierne sat to him for their portraits, he would affect to neglect the necessary implements of his art, and use his naked sword as a moll-stick. He had a haram and a bath at the top of his house, replete with every enticement and blandishment to awaken desire; and he thus lived, jocund and thoughtless, until his nerves were unstrung by age; when his spirits decayed with his animal powers, and he sighed and drooped into eternity!”

“The botany in the Louvre version is perfect, showing plants that would have thrived in a moist, dark grotto,” says Ann Pizzorusso, a geologist and Renaissance art historian. “But the plants in the London version are inaccurate. Some don’t exist in nature, and others portray flowers with the wrong number of petals.”

She concludes: “It seems unlikely the same person could have portrayed rock formations so accurately in the Louvre work and so incongruously in the National Gallery one – especially considering Leonardo’s faithfulness to nature. There is absolutely nothing in his body of work that is not true to nature.

Her conclusions are supported by John Grimshaw, a leading horticulturalist, who is struck by the realism of the Louvre painting, unlike the National Gallery version. In the French painting, he can easily identify iris, polemonium and aquilegia. He says: “There’s a very recognisable iris, a Jacob’s Ladder, a nice little palm tree, all sorts of well-observed bits of vegetation there – and proper plants.”

This argument against the NG painting sounds quite plausible.

It might be condition, but the Louvre Christ child's profile is better too - the hint that the face is turned away a fraction, exactly the sort of thing that rarely translates into copies. 

The extraordinary fact that has emerged from the painstaking ­studies of William Camfield, Kirk Varnedoe and Hector Obalk is that Duchamp could not have done what he said he did late in life. Irene Gammel and Glyn Thompson have revealed the truth of his much earlier private account that he did not submit the urinal to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York in 1917. Nevertheless, Duchamp’s late, fictional story is still taught in every class and recited in every book.

Duchamp maintained that he bought the urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works in New York, signed it with the pseudonym R. Mutt, and submitted it to the Independents exhibition, calling it Fountain. The ­urinal was rejected despite the objection of Duchamp’s rich friend Walter Arensberg, who argued that the ­society must honour its own rule and hang everything submitted. The ­urinal was a work of art, he claimed, because an artist had chosen it. 

[...]

Scholars have long since proved that Duchamp could not have bought the urinal from the J. L. Mott Iron Works because Mott didn’t sell that particular model. Most tellingly, on 11 April 1917, just two days after the board had rejected it, Duchamp wrote to his sister, a nurse in war-torn Paris, telling her that “one of my female friends under a masculine pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture”. The explosive contents of this letter did not enter the public domain until 1983 when the missive was published in the Archives of American Art Journal. [...]

The literary historian Irene Gammel was the first to discover who Duchamp’s “female friend” was. She was born Else Plötz in Germany in 1874, the daughter of a builder and local politician who philandered freely and beat her mother. [...]

In October 1917, the painter George Biddle described her room in New York filled with “odd bits of ­ironware, automobile tiles… ash cans, every conceivable horror, which to her tortured yet highly sensitive ­perception, became objects of formal beauty… it had to me quite as much authenticity as, for instance, Brancusi’s studio in Paris.”

Elsa was a poet of found objects, but she didn’t leave them as they were—she transformed them into works of art.

Elsa exploded in fury when the US declared war on her motherland, on Good Friday, 6 April 1917. Her ­target was the Society of Indepen­dent Artists, whose representatives had consistently cold-shouldered her. We believe she submitted an upside-down urinal, signed R. Mutt in a script similar to the one she sometimes used for her poems. [...]

If Duchamp did not submit the urinal, why would he pretend later that he did? After Elsa died in 1927, forgotten and in abject poverty, Duchamp began to let his name be associated with the urinal, and by 1950, four years after the death of Alfred Stieglitz, who photographed the original Fountain, he began to assume its authorship.

After he reluctantly abandoned his ambition to become a professional chess champion in 1933, Duchamp started to rebuild his artistic career by repackaging his early work. The problem was that there was not much of it. Only one of his original Readymades still existed, forgotten, in a drawer in Walter Arensberg’s desk. It is from this period, beginning in 1936, that replicas of the “lost” Readymades began to appear. Elsa’s urinal plugged a hole, but to make it his own Duchamp turned it into an attack on art itself.

Anyone who has ever had a tooth drilled knows the feeling of leaving the dentist’s office with lips involuntarily grimacing as the anaesthetic numbs the senses. Now imagine a painter who has similarly lost all feeling in their hands. This is just one of the techniques that New York-based Ryan Estep – one of the cutting-edge artists at the forefront of the current zeitgeist for process-based art – has devised in his highly performative, almost ritualistic art practice, where his methods and materials are as important as the abstract paintings themselves.

“I layer the lidocaine [the numbing agent used by dentists before uncomfortable procedures] onto the white,” explains Estep, “which has been painted around the edges with black paint.” At this point he takes the canvas off of the stretcher and, in a nod to his former work as an art technician, restretches it, but this time disturbing the still-wet borders and creating smudgy mistakes as he loses all feeling in his hands. This audacious dulling of the senses raises questions of authorship, randomness and the very idea of painting – while also creating beautiful works.

“The materials and methods sit mostly within the canon of manual labour,” Estep explains, hinting at the discrepancy between the physical work that goes into his paintings and their eventual impracticality. Asked about the safety of the procedure, Estep, a robust and charismatic 33-year-old, shrugs his lack of concern. More worryingly, he then laughingly recalls one time when he got the measurements wrong and lay completely immobilised on his studio floor for several hours.

A step too  far - the artist's numbness appears to stretch much further north than just his hands.

As the market has endorsed and enriched him, Koons has swollen, in his two latest series “Antiquity” and “Gazing Ball”, into the most tedious self-imitation. “Balloon Venus” blends his own inflatables lexicon with the archaic forms of the Venus of Willendorf. Outsize plaster replicas of classical figures – “Farnese Hercules”, “Ariadne” – bearing bright balloon-like glass spheres are destined, no more and no less than the garden ornaments they incorporate, for manicured suburban lawns.

“He says, if you’re critical, you’re already out of the game,” announced Koons’s dealer David Zwirner when these repetitive follies launched last year. Dollar power goes some way to explaining why Koons’s smooth sales-speak – “when people make judgments, they close all the possibility around them” – is not seen for what it is: a reversal of the spirit of intellectual openness that has allowed art to flourish since the Enlightenment. And of course it is obvious why Koons, like any entrepreneur boasting a luxury monopoly, directs his factory to produce a controlled stream of high-end, high-tech baubles. Less obvious is why this trading currency for the super-rich should interest the rest of us, or why museums and critics are endorsing it.

The Burrell has always been able to make loans within the UK: the Rembrandt was at the National’s exhibition of self-portraits a few years ago and a substantial group was shown at The Hayward in the 1970s.

What’s new is being able to loan abroad, which was not permitted under the terms of the original gift.  Maybe in future, if it needs the money, the Wallace might consider breaking the will of its donor?