Displaying items by tag: acquisition

An important archive comprising Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks, drawings and letters has been acquired by the nation from the estate of Lucian Freud through the Acceptance in Lieu Scheme. The archive has been permanently allocated to the National Portrait Gallery, which in 2012 staged the acclaimed Lucian Freud Portraits exhibition, the Gallery’s most visited ticketed exhibition.

The National Portrait Gallery plans to make the archive, which has never been published or exhibited, accessible to the public.

Arts Council England has announced the acceptance in lieu of inheritance tax of a painting by Sir Anthony Van Dyck of his close friend Olivia Porter. This exceptional portrait which has been allocated to The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, is a major acquisition for the North of England.

Portrait of Olivia Mrs. Endymion Porter by Van Dyck, one of the most important painters working in England in the seventeenth century, was painted circa 1637 when the artist was at the height of his career and is one of his finest female portraits.

The Dallas Museum of Art acquired a marble head of Herakles, the Greek hero the Romans called Hercules, at a Sotheby’s, New York auction of Egyptian, Classical, and Western Asiatic Antiquities in June. The marble head is from the late 1st century A.D. and is set upon an unrelated bust from the mid-2nd century A.D. This ensemble was composed by the 18th-century French sculptor Lambert-Sigisbert Adam (1700–59), who created sculptures for King Louis XV of France and Frederick the Great of Prussia.

The acquisition is a gift of David T. Owsley through the Alvin and Lucy Owsley Foundation, and strengthens the Museum’s collection of ancient art of the Mediterranean, of which a selection is on view in the Museum’s Level 2 Classical galleries.

A rare still life cubist collage by Pablo Picasso that features newspaper cuttings of ads for Quaker oats and Cherry Rocher cherry brandy has been acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Of the 30 collages Picasso made, only a handful remain in private hands. It shows a stylized glass and bottle standing on a table, in a medium seen as revolutionary in the early 20th century. It was made using charcoal, ink and pencil and stencilled lettering, but the bottle was cut from samples of a French newspaper, Le Journal, dated 12 December 1912.

The National Gallery of Art added another 1,541 works from the Corcoran Gallery of Art to its permanent collection earlier this month, bringing the total works it acquired from the dismantled Corcoran to almost 8,000.

The majority of works in this second round of acquisitions, voted on Oct. 1 and announced Thursday, are lithographs by the prolific 19th century Frenchman Honoré Daumier. The museum accepted 1,230 works by Daumier, including a large work from 1834 titled “Le Ventre Legislatif.”

An important work by American painter Benjamin West was recently installed in the McGlothlin American Galleries. The portrait was acquired during the June 18 meeting of the VMFA Board of Trustees and is among the most valuable acquisitions in VMFA history.

Benjamin West, also known as the “father of American painting,” was at one point the most prominent painter in the British Empire. He served as President of the Royal Academy, History Painter to the King, and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures until his death in 1820. While in London, he also mentored American artists Charles Wilson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Trumball – each of whom is represented in VMFA’s American Galleries.

An archetype of American marine painting by Luminist master Fitz Henry Lane (1804–65), entitled Ship in Fog (oil on canvas, ca. 1860), has been acquired by the Princeton University Art Museum. The painting dramatically bolsters the Museum’s esteemed holdings of American art, particularly American Luminism, and will substantially increase the collection’s utility as a research and teaching resource.

Ship in Fog is set in Gloucester Harbor from the vantage point of the open water, looking toward land. Lane rendered several seagoing vessels in a shroud of fog illuminated by the hazy late-afternoon sun, with the harbor’s Ten Pound Island and its lighthouse barely visible in the middle distance. In sharper focus in the foreground appear the backs of two figures in a rowboat and a meticulously rendered schooner brig at anchor nearby.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art announced today that its Frank Lloyd Wright house, which the Bentonville, Arkansas museum transplanted from New Jersey in 2014, will open to the public on November 11. Since its acquisition by the museum, the home, known as the Bachman-Wilson House, has been disassembled, traveled 1,200 miles, and been reconstructed in the museum’s garden.

Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn kept sketchbooks for his entire career; they served as a sort of nomadic studio where he experimented with visuals that bridged figurative and abstract ideas. Recently the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired 29 of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks, and this September they’re going on view to the public for the first time in Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed.

“The books are filled with stunningly gestural sketches of bits and pieces of daily life, both mundane capturing of everyday things, and powerful vignettes of intimate family moments,” Alison Gass, the Cantor’s associate director for collections, exhibitions, and curatorial affairs, told Hyperallergic.