Displaying items by tag: export license

A plan to permanently secure a £35m painting by Rembrandt for the UK has been thwarted. The Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657), which has hung in Penrhyn Castle in north Wales for 150 years, will remain in the UK under the ownership of an overseas buyer, who this week withdrew their export licence application.

The Art Fund had quietly started a campaign to try to buy the Rembrandt and present it to a major public collection, probably the National Museum Wales in Cardiff.

The UK culture minister has delayed issuing an export license on Rembrandt’s Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657), which has been in the UK for over 250 years but was recently sold to a foreign buyer for £35m. The painting is particularly popular with the public because Hooghsaet, a wealthy Amsterdam woman, is shown with her pet parrot—who was named in her will—not her estranged husband.

Earlier this year, the Rembrandt was sold by the Douglas-Pennant family, whose home is Penrhyn Castle, a National Trust mansion in north Wales. The portrait had hung there since 1860.

Russborough House has decided not to sell an important Rubens oil painting for which it obtained an export licence earlier this year.

The painting, titled "Portrait of a Monk, Bust-Length," was one of three by Rubens for which Russborough obtained an export licence on March 16th last. The other two are among a group of nine pictures from Russborough due to be auctioned at Christie’s in London in the coming weeks.

A Napoleonic medal cabinet has been saved from export from the UK after a successful fundraising campaign to buy it for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

In January, on the recommendation of a reviewing committee administered by Arts Council England, the British government decided to defer granting an export license for the cabinet until July, allowing the V&A time to raise the required sum of £534,000.

Back in May 2013, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced that it had bought Rembrandt Laughing, a 17^th century self-portrait by the Dutch master, from the London-based art dealer’s Hazlitt Gooden & Fox. On Tuesday, July 16, 2013, it was revealed that Britain’s culture minister, Ed Vaizey, had delayed approval of the Getty’s application for an export license until October 15, 2013, a tactic usually used to give collectors and museums enough time to collect the funds necessary to keep an artwork in the country.

In 2007, Rembrandt Laughing was put up for sale at a small auction house in England and said to be by a “follower of Rembrandt” even though a number of dealers thought it to be an authentic work by the artist. Eventually, scientific tests and studies by a leading Rembrandt scholar confirmed the attribution, causing the work’s value to skyrocket. In order to keep the painting in England past October 15, a British institution interested in buying the work will need to raise around $25.1 million, the price the Getty has agreed to pay for it.

The Getty has run into trouble exporting works out of Britain in the past. In 1994, the institution was told that they could not have Antonio Canova’s sculpture Three Graces, after raising $12 million and waiting five years.  

In 2006 The Cardsharps was sold to the late collector and scholar Sir Denis Mahon for just over $65,000 at an auction at Sotheby’s in London. At the time of the sale, Sotheby’s identified the work as being by a “follower” of the Italian master, Caravaggio (1571-1610). However, after his purchase, Mahon identified the work as a Caravaggio original and obtained an export license for the work that put its value at $15.5 million according to a claim filed at London’s High Court of Justice.

Due to their failure to identify The Cardsharps as an authentic Caravaggio painting, Sotheby’s is being sued by Lancelot William Thwaytes, who consigned the work to the 2006 auction. Thwaytes is now seeking unspecified damages, interest, and costs relating to the price difference between the painting’s 2006 selling price and what he believes it was actually worth on the open market that year had it been properly attributed to Caravaggio. Thwaytes claims that Sotheby’s was negligent in its research prior to the work’s sale, leading to its extraordinarily low selling price.

However, Sotheby’s stands behind its belief that the painting is a copy and not a work by Caravaggio’s hand, citing Caravaggio expert Professor Richard Spear and several other leading scholars. Sotheby’s added that their view was supported by the market’s reception to the painting when it was put up for auction.

Mahon, who passed away in 2011, donated 58 works from his collection worth around $155 million to various U.K. galleries.