Category Archives: Painting

Camera brings ‘unprecedented clarity’ to restoration of historic artworks

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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.

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‘Highly unusual’: lost 17th-century portrait of black and white women as equals saved for UK

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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.

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Rolf Harris, convicted sex offender and entertainer, dies aged 93

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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.

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Fears looted Nazi art still hanging in Belgian and British galleries

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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.

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‘When we rotated it 90 degrees it was obvious’: mystery sketch is rare Michelangelo draft for Sistine Chapel

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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.

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The other Monet: impressionist’s brother is star of new exhibition

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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.

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Ukrainian man goes on trial in France over theft of £1.3m painting found in Kyiv

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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.

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Rare Giacometti chandelier bought for £250 in London set to sell for £7m

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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.

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Computer says there is a 80.58% probability painting is a real Renoir

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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.

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Microsoft co-founder’s collection poised to raise $1bn in ‘largest art auction in history’

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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.

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John Singer Sargent sketch to return to National Trust house where it was created

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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.

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Salford museum pays £7.8m for LS Lowry’s Going to the Match

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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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Folio from ‘world masterpiece’ illuminated manuscript goes up for auction

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Section of the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month

A folio from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, one of the “finest illustrated manuscripts in existence” according to Sotheby’s, is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month.

The Shahnameh, also known as the Book of Kings, is an epic poem containing 50,000 rhyming couplets, telling the history of Persia’s rulers. It was written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010.

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Vandalised Mayer-Marton mural in Oldham church granted Grade II-listed status

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Crucifixion mosaic and fresco saved from destruction after two-year campaign

A stunning mural created in a Catholic church by a Jewish refugee from the Nazis has been saved from destruction, decay and vandalism after being granted Grade II-listed status by the UK government.

The Crucifixion, by the leading 20th-century artist George Mayer-Marton, is a rare combination of mosaic and fresco standing almost 8 metres (26ft) high, taking up an entire wall inside the Holy Rosary church in Oldham.

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Portrait of tyrant Thomas Picton moved to side room in Welsh museum

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Exhibition includes two specially commissioned works reframing story of former Trinidad governor

For more than a century, the portrait of Thomas Picton hung in a prominent position at the National Museum Cardiff, the image’s description hailing him as a military hero rather than a tyrant and a torturer, before it was removed from view in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.

From Monday the two-metre-tall portrait of Lt Gen Picton is back on display in the Welsh capital – but in a very different context.

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Kherson’s secret art society produces searing visions of life under Russian occupation

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Painters, playwrights and photographers have defied the threat of arrest in southern Ukrainian city to share their experiences

Under the threat of imprisonment, interrogation and the constant pressure of searches by Russian soldiers, six artists secretly met in a basement studio in the occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson.

In the months after their homes were taken over by Putin’s forces, the artists formed a residency during which they created dozens of works, including drawings, paintings, video, photography, diary entries and stage plays.

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Italian police thwart illegal sale of Artemisia Gentileschi painting

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Carabinieri allege dealers fraudulently exported €2m work by 17th-century baroque artist for auction in Vienna

Italian police have prevented the potential illegal sale by a Viennese auction house of a 17th-century painting by the baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

The carabinieri art squad said dealers had allegedly described the work as being painted by a follower of Gentileschi, and not the artist herself, in order to fraudulently obtain export permission from Italian authorities.

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Revealed: why Van Gogh’s ‘empty chair’ paintings were never shown together

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Sister-in-law hid one dedicated to Gauguin because of ‘anger at the French artist’s attacks on his former friend’

Shortly before Vincent van Gogh cut off his left ear and had a breakdown after quarrelling with his fellow artist, Paul Gauguin, in the French city of Arles in 1888, he created a pair of extraordinary paintings. One, Gauguin’s Chair, depicts a couple of books and a lit candle discarded on an ornate armchair. The other, Van Gogh’s Chair, shows a tobacco pipe and pouch on a rustic wooden chair and is instantly recognisable as one of the most famous paintings in the world.

Now, the mystery of how the diptych of paintings came to be split up – and why the picture of Gauguin’s chair was kept in the family collection while Van Gogh’s Chair was sold off – has finally been solved.

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Prague’s Orloj clock at centre of row over artist’s ‘amateur’ restoration

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Artist accused of putting likenesses of friends and acquaintances on 15th-century clock, possibly as a joke

One of Prague’s most famous landmarks, a 15th-century astronomical clock, is at the centre of an embarrassing row amid claims that an artist endowed it with likenesses of his friends and acquaintances in an expensive restoration project, possibly as a joke.

The 600-year-old Orloj – long a magnet for tourists who gaze up in wonder as the 12 apostles are set in motion by the clock striking the hour – reopened in a blaze of fanfare in 2018 after a £2.1m refurbishment to the city’s medieval old town hall that included an upgrade to the clock’s intricate machinery.

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Sotheby’s debut of Robbie Williams’ art puts Sharon and Trish on show

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Paintings produced in collaboration with Ed Godrich are titled with ‘names that define the 1980s’

Trish has never been seen in public before. Nor have Sharon, Janet, Debbie, Denise, Donna, Jacqui, Joanne, Kim, Lorraine, Mandy, Paula, Sandra or Tina.

But for the next two weeks, these 14 artworks by the pop star Robbie Williams and his creative partner Ed Godrich will be on display at Sotheby’s in central London.

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