Displaying items by tag: Art Fund

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.

Nine photographs by Paul Strand (1890-1976), one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, have been acquired by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where they have gone on public display until September 20. Taken from Strand’s series of Hebridean photographs from South Uist in 1954, the works are the first examples of his Scottish work to enter into a public collection in Scotland.

This major acquisition, supported by the Art Fund, is composed of nine vintage black and white portraits of Scottish lives and landscapes in South Uist, an island in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland.

The legal owner of Henry Moore's sculpture Draped Seated Woman (1957-58) is Tower Hamlets Council, the High Court in London ruled on July 8, ending a long-running legal battle with Bromley Council over the work.
 
The former mayor of the east London borough, Lutfur Rahman consigned the work to auction in February 2013. But the sale was postponed after the Art Fund charity and the Museum of London discovered evidence that suggested ownership of the sculpture lay with Bromley Council in south London.

Publicly funded museums that seek to sell off "the family silver" will face tougher sanctions from the body that overseas the UK's museums. The Museums Association (MA) is to tighten up its ethics code to avoid controversial sell-offs of valuable antiquities from cash-strapped museum collections.

It is also in talks with the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the Art Fund, and Arts Council England to establish a "joined-up response" to those selling important objects for financial gain. They are also investigating whether to launch an official list of at-risk collections.

"The Four Times of Day" (circa 1850) by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot  has been purchased for the nation with the help of a grant from the Art Fund. The four panels have a long association with the UK. Representing Morning, Noon, Evening and Night, they 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.

The Art Fund, which led the £15.75m fundraising campaign to save the Wedgwood Museum’s collection from being sold at auction, announced on October 3, that its public appeal has raised the final £2.74m needed.

After its successful Save Wedgwood campaign, the fund plans to transfer ownership of the collection of ceramics, paintings and the archive of the company founded by Josiah Wedgwood in the 18th century to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to protect legal ownership. The V&A in turn will loan the collection back to the Wedgwood Museum in Staffordshire in the English Midlands.

The Wedgwood Collection, described as one of the most important industrial archives in the world, could be broken up and sold unless £2.7m is raised in just three months.

The Art Fund has launched a public appeal to save the vast collection of treasures held in Staffordshire including ceramics, manuscripts and paintings, which has been described by Unesco as “unparalleled in its diversity and breadth”.

The price of the collection was set at £15.7m, and the majority has been raised from the Art Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and charitable trusts.

Artists Antony Gormley and Grayson Perry, Art Fund director Stephen Reuchen and Innocent drinks co-founder Richard Reed were all gathered at Waterloo station yesterday morning to celebrate the launch of Art Everywhere 2014. First launched in 2013, this edition is bigger and better, the project will last six weeks. Mounted all over the UK, displaying 30,000 artworks on billboards and poster sites to share the nation’s favourite art. As the UK’s largest outdoor exhibition, the project aims at engaging with the country’s population: curated by different art professionals and creatives, 25 artworks out of 70 were selected by the public trough a vote gathering 38,000 participants via Facebook. The most popular works were Hockney’s My Parents (1977), Dora Carrington’s Far mat Watendlath (1921), Laura Knight’s Ruby Loftus screwing a Breech-ring (1943) followed in 4th position Grayson Perry’s The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal (2012).  In London, Waterloo Station and Piccadilly Circus are the major spots where you will be able to admire these pieces.

A national fundraising campaign has been launched to buy four bronze angels that shine a light on the tempestuous relationship between Henry VIII and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.

The Victoria and Albert Museum needs £5m to buy the sculptures that, for centuries, were thought lost. The museum already has half the money, thanks to £2m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and £500,000 from the Art Fund.

The angels were originally commissioned by Wolsey for his tomb. He hoped that they would have sat spectacularly on top of four 9ft (2.75 metres) tall bronze columns.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park was on Wednesday named UK museum of the year, winning the £100,000 Art Fund prize with judges praising it as a "truly outstanding museum with a bold artistic vision."

The museum near Wakefield, spread out among 200 hectares (500 acres) of parkland, had modest beginnings, founded by Peter Murray in 1977 when he was principal lecturer in art history at Bretton Hall College and had the idea of putting some sculpture in the grounds. Today Murray is executive director of an organization which is one of the world's most important open air museums, with 160 staff and 220 volunteers.