Betwixt vibrant red and calm blue sits ‘royal’ purple. You may call it mauve or violet, and it may not always be accompanied by a catchy preliminary adjective, but the colour purple was the most sought after in history, and has roots in mythology, piety, art and royalty. The most refracted colour when light passes through a prism, purple is at the far end of the visible colour spectrum, and is the hardest colour for...
The notorious Banksy strikes again. Season’s Greetings, which appeared on the side of a nondescript garage in Port Talbot just before Christmas in 2018, has been sold to a private dealer for a six-figure sum. About 20,000 people are thought to have made their way to visit the anonymous street artist’s latest mural since it was discovered in the Welsh town, but the graffiti now belongs to Essex-based Banksy expert John Brandler. After finding himself...
As quickly as it was rediscovered, a painting believed to be a lost work of Renaissance master Michelangelo has disappeared, a matter of days before experts were due to examine it. The 16th-century artwork depicts Mary, Joseph and a sleeping baby Jesus and had been undisturbed in a dark corner of the Sin Ludgerus church in the small Flemish town of Zele. Upon his discovery, pastor Jan Van Raemdonck, 61, noted the startling similarities between...
After 142 years on New Bond Street, one of London’s oldest commercial art galleries, The Fine Art Society, is marking a new chapter by offering over 300 works in a Sotheby’s auction taking place in February 2019. The sale on 5 February 2019 will see pieces by some of the most distinguished artists of the last 150 years go under the hammer. Perhaps most significant is James McNeill Whistler—one of the first and most celebrated...
A rare oil sketch by Rembrandt, Study of a Head of a Young Man (c.1650), sold for £9,480,800 at Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening Sale on 5 December. Appearing on the market for the first time in 60 years, the 17th-century masterpiece left its estimate of £6-8 million far behind at Sotheby’s London auction house. A touching portrait of Christ, the painting until recently hung in the Dutch master’s house in Amsterdam. Interest in the work...
A week of impressive Russian art sales at Sotheby’s concluded on Wednesday (28 November 2018), realising a combined total of £23 million. All three sales reached totals above their pre-sale estimates, but the Russian Pictures sale alone raised £13.4 million and set two artist records. The first, for Konstantin Makovsky—whose epic canvas Blind Man’s Bluff (c.1839-1915) sold for £4.3 million. The second, for Georgian primitive painter, Niko Pirosmani. Georgian Woman Wearing A Lechaki tripled its...
A portrait of a young Charles Dickens that had been lost for 174 years has been unearthed in a box of trinkets at a junk sale in South Africa. The palm-sized portrait, painted by artist and social campaigner Margaret Gillies in 1843, portrays the celebrated Victorian writer at the age of 31. The portrait was last seen in public in 1844 when it was displayed at the Royal Academy in London and Gillies reported the...
Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Auction concluded in New York with an increase of 16.9 percent over the same sale in 2017. The auction was led by Gerhard Richter’s extraordinary Abstraktes Bild (1987)—which sold for $32 million. Measuring over 100 inches in both height and weight, only five of the 18 works from this period in Richter’s career remain in private hands. After the contemporary art auction on 14 November, Sotheby’s now holds the top five...
Unseen by the public for two centuries, Marie Antoinette’s diamonds and pearls went under Sotheby’s hammer as part of one of the most important royal jewellery collections ever to come to auction. The auction took place in the Swiss city of Geneva on Thursday 15 November and, out of more than 100 lots, included 10 breathtaking treasures that belonged to the ill-fated Queen of France. The major collection—held by the Italian royal House of Bourbon-Parma...
Celebrated British artist David Hockney has set a new auction record after Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) sold for $90.3 million at Christie’s auction house in New York. After more than nine minutes of bidding, one of Hockney’s most iconic images set a new world record price for a living artist, helping Christie’s Post War and Contemporary Evening Sale to realise $357.6 million on 15 November. See also: First Posthumous Exhibition...
