Displaying items by tag: Old Master

During the culturally repressive late-16th and 17th centuries, Spanish kings often secreted away their nude paintings in rooms known as “salas reservadas,” where they could enjoy them in private.

Eventually, these works made it out into the open and, in 1830, into a gallery at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where they remain among the finest of that institution’s holdings.

The Tenth Annual MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK week will take place January 23 through January 30, with a Preview scheduled for Friday, January 22, at 30 leading art galleries on the Upper East Side’s “Gold Coast’ in New York.

Timed to coincide with New York’s major January art-buying events, including the Old Master auctions and The Winter Antiques Show, over the past decade MASTER DRAWINGS NEW YORK has given top dealers from the US as well as the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy an opportunity to show their newest acquisitions to the largest assembly of drawings scholars and patrons to gather in New York each year.

An actor known for his role as an Italian Mafia assassin is now promoting and exhibiting an old master painting of a bloodied, dying saint.

Federico Castelluccio, who played the ponytailed hired gun Furio Giunta on “The Sopranos” TV series, has rediscovered the artwork, a depiction of St. Sebastian said to have been painted by Guercino in the 1630s. This week, in its first American showing, the painting went on view at the Princeton University Art Museum after its European debut in a survey of St. Sebastian portraits at a castle near Turin, Italy, last year.

A painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder fetched 9.3 million pounds ($14.3 million) at Sotheby’s in London, an auction record for the German Renaissance artist.

The sale of the Cranach and other works tallied 39.3 million pounds, toward the lower end of the presale estimate. Wednesday’s result represented a 42 percent drop from an equivalent auction a year ago, when 68.3 million pounds worth of Old Master and British paintings were sold. Of 57 lots offered, 20 failed to find buyers, while auction records were set for five artists.

Over the past four decades, the art collection at Russborough House has drawn both the attention of I.R.A. thieves and the interest of more than a million visitors to this 18th-century Georgian mansion.

Soon that collection will be smaller, though, thanks to a decision by the foundation that oversees the house to sell off nine artworks, including six old master paintings by the likes of Rubens, David Teniers the Younger and Francesco Guardi, at Christie’s in London next month.

In an effort to maintain the financial future of Russborough, a historic Georgian house in Ireland, a selection of Old Master paintings from The Alfred Beit Foundation will be on offer at the Christie’s London Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale on July 9.

Nearly 300 years old, the heritage home requires constant restoration and upkeep entrusted to the Beit family, notable patrons of the arts. The proceeds of the sale will go to an endowment fund managed by the Beit’s that will ensure the future of Russborough.

"Rembrandt: A Decade of Brilliance (1648-1658)" now at the Hoehn Family Galleries at the University of San Diego, teams a core group of outstanding etchings owned by local resident Robert Hoehn—one of the world’s foremost private collectors of Rembrandt prints—with distinguished examples from public and private collections in the U.S. and Europe. The show focuses on the years of Rembrandt’s most intense experimentation with etching, when the Dutch master harnessed the medium’s demanding technical processes to his artistic vision, particularly in his biblical narratives, creating some of the most ambitious and fully realized works in the history of printmaking. The show allows us to compare multiple versions of significant images side-by-side to tease out the specific procedures Rembrandt employed to achieve the resplendent effects of his greatest graphic masterpieces.

During "Frans Hals: Work in Progress," from June 13 to September 27 in the Frans Hals Museum, visitors will be able to watch the restoration of Hals’s world-famous "Regentesses of the Old Men’s Almshouse" as it happens. The museum’s restorers will be working on this painting in a workshop in one of the galleries under the public gaze. This ‘work in progress’ is part of an exhibition about the restoration of the three unique regent portraits that Frans Hals painted. Visitors will be able to watch the progress of this massive restoration project, learn about the restoration history and the art-historical context of the paintings and share in a number of extraordinary discoveries.

Regent Portraits
The Frans Hals Museum is home to the largest number of paintings by Frans Hals in the world, and in this exhibition will be concentrating on a unique part of this collection—the three regent portraits.

Two paintings by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn may leave France without as much as a whimper as the country says it’s too broke to buy them.

With the government’s coffers bare, France’s culture ministry is letting banking tycoon Eric de Rothschild export the masterpieces, paving the way for a sale that could fetch more than 150 million euros ($163 million), according to estimates. Under French law, major artworks can’t leave the country without the state’s permission. If the country denies permission, it must buy the art within 30 months.

Many in the crowd of dealers, collectors, and onlookers attending Sotheby's main sale of Old Master paintings on Thursday January 29 remarked on the difference that a single day made when contrasting the sale with the dismal results at Christie's Old Masters sale the day before (see: Canaletto, Caravaggio Fail to Sell at Christie's Worst Old Masters Sale Since 2002).

The sale totaled $57 million, as compared with an overall presale estimate of $54–77.6 million. Of 104 lots offered, 73 (or 70 percent) found buyers. The stronger sold-by-value rate, 78 percent, reflected spirited bidding on a few key lots.