Sotheby’s Old Masters Week sales bring a strong total of $73.1 million

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s annual Old Masters Week auctions in New York concluded today with a strong cumulative total of $73,052,668. Thursday’s sale of Important Old Master Paintings & Sculpture brought $62,081,477, and was highlighted by five remarkable pictures that achieved prices over $4 million – led by Canaletto’s View of the Churches of the Redentore and San Giacomo… from the Estate of Lady Forte that sold for $5,682,500 (est. $5/7 million*), and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait Lucretia that brought $5,122,500 [...]

Sotheby’s to offer 13 works from the Forbes Collection depicting the Franco-Prussian War

NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s 27 January 2012 sale of Old Master & 19th Century European Art will feature a group of 13 works from The Forbes Collection that depict the Battle of Champigny, one of the final engagements of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The group comprises Édouard Detaille’s celebrated composition Champigny; décembre 1870 (est. $70/100,00); a total of four preparatory works – two each by Detaille and Alphonse de Neuville – for the popular Panorama de Champigny that opened Paris’s Panorama [...]

Rare and rediscovered paintings lead Christie’s Old Master paintings and drawings sales

NEW YORK, N.Y.- Christie’s announces its upcoming auctions of Old Master Paintings and Old Master Drawings on January 25-26, 2012, offering a superb selection of rarities, rediscoveries and masterpieces. The sales will be led by a graceful tondo painting of The Virgin Nursing the Christ Child by Hans Memling, one of two works by this artist remaining in private hands, and a dazzling, light-filled oil sketch of The Arrival of Henri III at the Villa Contarini (c. 1744–45) by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, [...]

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents an exhibition of European drawings

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y.- The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College will present an exhibition of the finest early collection of European drawings in the United States this fall from September 16 through December 11, 2011. On Friday, September 16, at 6pm in Taylor Hall (room 203), William Breazeale, Curator of the Crocker Art Museum, will deliver a lecture entitled “Fragonard on the Frontier: The Crocker Collection of Old Master Drawings.” This will be followed by an opening reception at the Art Center. [...]

Stephanie Wiles named new Director of Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum

ITHACA, N.Y.- Stephanie Wiles of Oberlin College has been named the next director of Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell Provost Kent Fuchs has announced. Wiles has been the John G.W. Cowles Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin since July 2004. A specialist in Old Master drawings and prints and British and American art, she has organized numerous exhibitions, been responsible for acquisitions of works by artists ranging from Rembrandt van Rijn to Sol LeWitt and [...]

Sotheby’s to Sell an Appealing Private Collection of Old Master Paintings Assembled by Saam and Lily Nijstad

LONDON.- Sotheby’s London announces the sale of the collection of Old Master Paintings, on Thursday 7th July 2011, formed by Saam & Lily Nijstad over the last four decades. Saam Nijstad was for many years a leading dealer in Dutch Old Masters based in The Hague, but he and his wife were also passionate collectors for nearly sixty years. Assembled with care and knowledge, the collection of 38 lots is estimated to fetch in excess of £2 million. Santi Di [...]

Agony and Ecstasy: A Rediscovered Masterpiece on View at Moretti Fine Art, NY

NEW YORK, NY.- Once again, Andrew Butterfield and Fabrizio Moretti, the renowned Re- naissance and Baroque specialists, will collaborate to present Agony, Ecstasy, Ivory: The Saint Sebastian of Agnesius, A Rediscovered Masterpiece, at Moretti Fine Art/Adam Williams Fine Art 24 East 80th Street, January 21–February 4, 2011. Coinciding with the Old Master Drawings Week and the auction house sales, this rare sculpture accompanies an exhibition of significant Italian and other European Old Master paintings, including works by Bicci de Lorenzo, [...]

Winter Antiques Show Celebrates Its 57th Year with Three New Exhibitors and a Loan Exhibition

NEW YORK, NY.- The Winter Antiques Show celebrates its 57th year as America’s most prestigious antiques show, providing museums, established collectors, dealers, design professionals and first-time buyers with opportunities to see and purchase exceptional pieces showcased by 74 exhibitors. This year, specialists in 17th to 19th century American furniture and decorative arts, old master drawings and European sculpture, and Southeast Asian art join this fully vetted show, which runs from January 21-30, 2011. From an Egyptian relief depicting Akhenaten through [...]

Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, David Becker, Dies

BRUNSWICK, ME.- David Becker died on November 26, 2010 at the Gosnell Memorial Hospice in Scarborough, ME. He was born in Albany, NY on October 15, 1947 and educated at The Albany Academy, the Taft School, and Bowdoin College from which he graduated in 1970 with a degree in history. While there, he discovered the Bowdoin Museum of Art and began developing an interest in art and especially printmaking. In 1983 he received a Master of Arts degree from New [...]

Newly-Discovered Works to Lead Sotheby’s Sale of Old Master Drawings in New York

NEW YORK, NY.- Three major discoveries will lead Sotheby’s sale of Old Master drawings in New York on 26 January 2011: a newly discovered drawing by Sir Peter Paul Rubens; and two exceptionally rare composition studies by Rembrandt van Rijn and Perino del Vaga, neither seen by scholars since the early 20th century. The discovery of Rubens’s Venus nursing Cupids adds an important and beautiful work to the artist’s oeuvre that has long eluded scholars and collectors (est. $500/800,000). Rembrandt’s [...]

Old Master Drawings: Guercino, Rubens, Tintoretto at the Lady Lever Gallery

LIVERPOOL.- A new exhibition explores why artists have drawn over the centuries – from copying other works to making life studies – and the role of sketching in the creation of artworks.  Old Master Drawings: Guercino, Rubens, Tintoretto 22 October 2010 to 2 May 2011 features 29 drawings from the Old Master collections of the Lady Lever and Walker Art Galleries.  Works by some of the great Italian Renaissance and Northern European artists between 1500 and 1800 are used to examine the reasons [...]

Lady Lever Art Gallery Announces Old Master Drawings Exhibition

LIVERPOOL.- A new exhibition explores why artists have drawn over the centuries – from copying other works to making life studies – and the role of sketching in the creation of artworks. Old Master Drawings: Guercino, Rubens, Tintoretto 22 October 2010 to 2 May 2011 features 29 drawings from the Old Master collections of the Lady Lever and Walker Art Galleries. Works by some of the great Italian Renaissance and Northern European artists between 1500 and 1800 are used to [...]

Master Drawings from a Distinguished Collection to Be Offered at Sotheby’s

LONDON.- Sales of important private collections have always been the lifeblood of the art market, returning long-hidden material into circulation and also serving as a fascinating permanent record of the taste and eye of an individual collector. In the Old Master field at least, such sales are rather less frequent now than in previous generations, so they are ever more eagerly awaited by private and institutional buyers alike. Formerly owned, in many cases, by leading collectors of the 18th and [...]

Italian Old Master Drawings on View at Metropolitan Museum

NEW YORK, NY.- An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo presents 72 extraordinary works of the 16th through 18th centuries, from one of the preeminent collections of Italian Old Master drawings in private hands. It features masterpieces by gifted and historically important draftsmen—principally Italian masters but also artists whose careers brought them south of the Alps—among them Correggio, Parmigianino, Bernini, Poussin, Guercino, Canaletto, and Tiepolo. The drawings represent the principal centers of Italian art: Florence, Rome, [...]

Brooklyn Museum Appoints Richard Aste Curator of European Art

BROOKLYN, NY.- Richard Aste, an art historian with broad experience working with European painting, sculpture, and works on paper, has been appointed Curator of European Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Currently Associate Curator at Museo de Arte de Ponce in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Aste has worked with that museum’s important collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French paintings and sculptures while organizing several European-based exhibitions there. Prior to the position in Ponce, Aste was a specialist at Christie’s in Old Master [...]