In April 1919, Grand Duchess Xenia, sister of the last tsar, was among the surviving Romanovs to escape from Russia on board the British battleship, HMS Marlborough. Within the previous nine months, 17 members of the imperial family had been murdered by revolutionaries. The tsar, tsarina and their five children had been shot in the Urals; the following day, six ...
The news was already the talk of the London art world; then on 17 May 1816, as they were filing into a banquet at the Mansion House, the veteran painter Joseph Farington came alongside Turner to check the details for himself, which he duly noted in his diary: "Turner told me that he had made an engagement to make 120 ...
Robert Mapplethorpe is well known as the bad boy of the New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s, famous mainly for his studies of male nudes, his celebrity portraits and a long-time collaboration with the singer and poet Patti Smith. His frank accounts of homoerotic sexuality – in the wild days before HIV/AIDS – are well known. Some authorities ...
Among a consignment of works by the 19th-century British artist, Matthew Shepperson, that arrived at Bonhams Oxford salerooms in August 2010, there was a striking portrait of a gentleman in a black tunic and white collar. Shepperson was a painter who is hardly remembered today, but who worked as a jobbing artist at Buckingham Palace. The portrait was originally consigned ...
In December, Bonhams will auction a set of five Meissen vases once owned by the legendary Saxon statesman and collector, Count Heinrich von Brühl (1700-63) and which were in the possession of his descendants until 1926. Brühl was a cabinet minister when he was named director of the Meissen porcelain manufactory in 1732 and, as a perk, was able to ...
Shortly after I first got to know him, I asked Lucian Freud whether he collected pictures by Frank Auerbach (he owned a number of splendid examples). Lucian was mildly put out at the idea of being a collector, because – as the most individualistic of men – he never liked the thought that he belonged to a group of any kind. He ...
In 2006, less than a year before Paddy Bedford's death, he was given a retrospective exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia's leading venue for cutting-edge contemporary art, where he had the opportunity to see most of his work assembled. During the same year Bedford was commissioned to provide a work for the exterior of the ...
Nothing more encapsulates the western concept of Chinese porcelain than the notion of 'blue and white'. For more than six centuries, both Chinese and overseas owners have enjoyed the astonishing, revolutionary, high-fired, translucent, resonant ware that became widely available in the 14th century.
Traditionally associated with China's porcelain-producing capital city, Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province, 'blue and white' became a ...
The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev was something of a connoisseur of visual art but tended to be damning of his compatriots' work. In his novella Smoke, he has a character dismiss the very idea of Russian painting: "Russian art, indeed! Russian impudence and conceit, I know, and Russian feebleness, too, but Russian art, begging your pardon, I've never come ...
A number of wine speculators have been looking anxious in recent months and it is all to do with what is happening in Asia rather than the current woes in Europe. Most of the large wine dealers in London will admit that for the past few years, the vast majority of their sales have been to Chinese buyers, whether they ...
My family always think of The Lady with an Ermine as 'our' Leonardo because it comes from the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, my father's home city. Yet the painting's temporary absence abroad – as star of the National Gallery exhibition – has not drastically diminished the attractions of the old Polish capital. I have been visiting Kraków since I was ...
I love Paris and I love the Musée d'Orsay – a fascinating building that used to be a railway station, and still has the station clock and huge station windows. Within the museum is my favourite room, Salle 4, which contains the work of one of my heroes, the caricaturist Honoré Daumier.
This room in the museum contains Daumier's ...
