Exhibition honours French impressionist whose landscapes have helped island create jobs and forge global ties
The island of Guernsey may be best known as a tax haven for the super-wealthy, a pleasant holiday destination, and for the rich milk its docile cows produce.
But thanks to a brief sojourn by Pierre-Auguste Renoir 140 years ago, and the bold thinking of culture lovers on the island, it is becoming a draw for art fans.
Continue reading...Much-delayed £38.6m project brings works from 1800 to 1945 together for the first time as single collection
A suite of new galleries built to present work by many of Scotland’s most famous artists, including the Glasgow Boys, Phoebe Anna Traquair and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, opens to the public this week.
For the first time, the galleries in Edinburgh will showcase significant pieces of Scottish art held by National Galleries Scotland in a single collection, after a much-delayed construction project that involved digging out new space beside the Mound in the city centre.
Continue reading...The very personal work, owned by Charles I, discovered after being left in storage for years
“A woman’s name raises doubts until her work is seen,” wrote the artist Artemisia Gentileschi to a collector of her paintings in 1649, going on to assure him that her canvases “will speak for themselves”. It took three-and-a-half centuries for the name of Gentileschi to triumphantly step out from the shadows of art history, but it has taken even longer for one of her forgotten paintings to re-emerge from the dark. A remarkable find made in a royal storeroom at Hampton Court, followed by hours of careful conservation effort, has led to the unearthing of Susanna and the Elders, a genuine lost Gentileschi.
“It really is super-exciting,” Anna Reynolds, the deputy surveyor of the king’s pictures, told the Observer. “You just could not see the quality of the painting beneath the grime until now, but absolutely it is true and this find has come about as a result of Artemisia’s recently restored reputation. It had been misattributed and left in storage for many years and no one had taken a closer look.”
Continue reading...Che Lovelace paintings in St James’s church are first permanent art commission to honour Quobna Ottobah Cugoano
A permanent artwork to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the baptism of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, one of Britain’s most important abolitionists, has been unveiled at a church in central London.
The paintings by the Trinidad-based artist Che Lovelace, displayed at St James’s church, Piccadilly, are the first permanent art commission to commemorate Cugoano, a significant but largely forgotten figure in the history of Black Britain.
Continue reading...Works by painter, whose turbulent life often overshadowed his short career, go on display in Paris
The life of the Russian-born French artist Nicolas de Staël was short, turbulent and ultimately tragic.
Forced into exile by the 1917 revolution, orphaned, a loner who was hopelessly romantic but unlucky in love, De Staël died at the age of 41 after he threw himself out of the window of his Côte d’Azur atelier after the woman with whom he was obsessed rejected him.
Continue reading...Paintings from a climb that retraced an 1800s route on western Europe’s highest mountain reveals the extent of the peak’s melting ice
A British landscape artist who recreated a climb made 150 years ago to document the impact of the climate crisis on western Europe’s highest mountain says what he found was so grim it reminded him of the “dark paintings” of Francisco de Goya.
James Hart Dyke ascended Mont Blanc’s ancien passage north face, the route taken in 1786 by the first climbers to reach the summit. It was also the same one taken in August 1873 by French painter Gabriel Loppé, whose climb inspired Hart Dyke’s own.
Continue reading...Jaq Grantford’s portrait of the beloved actor and former Play School presenter wins $5,000 prize decided by the public
A realist portrait of television personality and actor Noni Hazlehurst has won the $5,000 people’s choice award for the 2023 Archibald prize, announced at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Wednesday.
It is a first-time Archibald win for Melbourne artist Jaq Grantford and the second portrait the artist has painted of Hazlehurst.
Continue reading...UK capital as ‘huge generator of wealth’ under threat as a third of visual artists struggle to pay for studios
What makes Britain’s capital city so magnetic? Familiar landmarks? The nightlife? Or its financial, fashion and art trades? Maybe. But behind the glamour and money a network of artists is giving London the crucial appeal of a place where new things happen, while working on the edge of poverty.
A survey released on 13 July is to reveal just how close many of London’s visual artists are to giving up on a career that has pushed them to the bottom of the pile. Close to a third of those asked said lack of funds might force them out within five years. And just under half said they cannot afford to build savings or pay into a pension plan.
Continue reading...Technology will allow conservators to use fluorescence to identify and remove ageing varnish with total accuracy
Scientists have developed technology that will revolutionise the restoration of historic works of art by allowing conservators to identify and remove ageing varnish with total accuracy.
A team at King’s College London’s department of physics has harnessed the power of fluorescence to bring “unprecedented clarity” to the conservation process, said Prof Klaus Suhling.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Unknown artwork was barred from leaving the UK after surfacing at an auction in 2021
A painting has been saved for the UK in recognition of its “outstanding significance” for the study of race and gender in 17th-century Britain, it will be announced on Friday.
The anonymous artist’s portrait of two women – one black and one white, depicted as companions and equals with similar dress, hair and jewellery – has been bought by Compton Verney, an award-winning gallery in Warwickshire.
Continue reading...Australian-born artist and musician was jailed for sexual assaults on children after a 50-year career as one of Britain’s best-known TV performers
The entertainer Rolf Harris, whose career as one of the best-loved performers on British TV ended in the disgrace of convictions for indecent assault on teenage girls, has died aged 93.
In October 2022, it was reported that Harris had neck cancer and was barely able to speak. His death was confirmed by a registrar at Maidenhead town hall, close to his family home in the Berkshire village of Bray.
Continue reading...Leading art museums are reassessing their works after a Belgian journalist traced how a fascist sympathiser acquired a Jewish dealer’s collection
In August 1940, Samuel Hartveld and his wife, Clara Meiboom, boarded the SS Exeter ocean liner in Lisbon, bound for New York. Aged 62, Hartveld, a successful Jewish art dealer, left a world behind. The couple had fled their home city of Antwerp not long before the Nazi invasion of Belgium in May 1940, parting with their 23-year-old son, Adelin, who had decided to join the resistance.
Hartveld also said goodbye to a flourishing gallery in a fine art deco building in the Flemish capital, a rich library and more than 60 paintings. The couple survived the war, but Adelin was killed in January 1942. Hartveld was never reunited with his paintings, which were snapped up at a bargain-basement price by a Nazi sympathiser and today are scattered throughout galleries in north-western Europe, including Tate Britain.
Continue reading...Image of man battling serpents is confirmed as preparation for renaissance artist’s masterpiece
A 16th-century drawing of a nude man, seen from behind, has been identified as a study by Michelangelo for his monumental masterpiece, the ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.
The red chalk drawing has been linked to one of the figures battling serpents on the Worship of the Brazen Serpent painting. It is thought to date from 1512, shortly before Michelangelo painted that final section of one of the world’s most famous works of art, which he had started in 1508.
Continue reading...A Paris show will focus on Claude’s little-known elder sibling Léon Monet and his impressionist collection
The name Monet conjures up pictures of water lilies, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament and French haystacks, some of European art’s best known works.
Now a Paris exhibition will focus on another, lesser known, Monet: Léon Monet, the artist Claude Monet’s long overlooked elder brother who supported him when he was poor and struggling to make his name.
Continue reading...Paul Signac’s Le Port de La Rochelle was lifted from a museum in 2018 and found a year later by Kviv police in an unconnected raid
A Ukrainian man has gone on trial in France accused of masterminding the theft of a €1.5m (£1.3m) painting discovered in a house in Kyiv a year after it disappeared from a museum in Nancy.
The work by Paul Signac, Le Port de La Rochelle, went missing from the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Nancy, north-east France, in 2018.
Continue reading...Piece acquired by English painter in antiques shop in 1960s has been confirmed as lost work by Italian sculptor
Sometimes a hunch pays off, and when the English painter John Craxton recognised a work of genius for sale in a London antiques shop, he made very much the right call.
Craxton parted with £250 for an unusual chandelier he suspected was by the great sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Now that chandelier, made in the late 1940s, may sell at Christie’s in a few weeks’ time for as much as £7m. Pieces by the revered Swiss artist are the most expensive sculptures to buy at auction, and his work regularly breaks saleroom records.
Continue reading...Swiss company uses algorithm to judge whether contested Portrait de femme (Gabrielle) is genuinely by French artist
Staring enigmatically at an unseen object to her right, the black-haired woman bears a striking resemblance to the person depicted in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting Gabrielle, which Sotheby’s recently valued at between £100,000-150,000.
However, art connoisseurs disagree over whether the work, which is owned by a private Swiss collector, is the real deal. Now, artificial intelligence has waded in to help settle the dispute, and the computer has deemed that it probably is a genuine Renoir.
Continue reading...Proceeds from sale of 150 works owned by the late billionaire Paul Allen will go to charity
The vast private art collection of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is expected to fetch a record-breaking $1bn (£890m) when it is auctioned next week.
The collection of more than 150 masterpieces includes Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses, Ensemble (petite version) and Paul Cézanne’s landscape La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, which are both expected to sell for more than $100m, and Gustav Klimt’s 1903 work Birch Forest, which has an auctioneer’s estimate of $90m.
Continue reading...Oil sketch of Elsie Palmer to go on display at Ightham Mote in Kent after being acquired by trust
An oil sketch by John Singer Sargent of one of his most famous models will be returned to the English country house where it was painted after being acquired by the National Trust.
Sargent’s sketch of Elsie Palmer, which was done in preparation for his masterpiece A Lady in White, will go on display at Ightham Mote in Kent, where the Palmer family lived and hosted artistic and literary gatherings for the likes of the actor Ellen Terry and the novelist Henry James in the late 1890s.
Continue reading...Purchase of 1953 painting beloved by football fans made possible by gift from charitable foundation
A painting by LS Lowry beloved by football fans and art enthusiasts has been bought by the Lowry museum and gallery in Salford, saving it from disappearing into a private collection.
The museum paid £7.8m including fees for Going to the Match, painted in 1953, at an auction on Wednesday evening. The purchase was made possible by a gift from the Law Family charitable foundation, which was set up by the hedge fund manager and Conservative party donor Andrew Law and his wife, Zoë. The painting had been estimated to fetch £5m-£8m.
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