Posted on: July 20, 2022 by Joanna Owens
The Tate is to take the unusual step of deaccessioning from its collection and returning to the donor material from the studio of Francis Bacon, once described as the Tate Archive’s most important acquisition ever and suggested to be worth around £20m. The Tate is one of a number of UK National Museums governed by national legislation, whose […]
Posted on: July 5, 2022 by Alexander Herman
At the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin on Friday, a joint declaration on the return of the Benin Bronzes was signed by Germany’s Foreign Minister and Commissioner for Culture and Media, and by Nigeria’s Minister of Culture and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. By all accounts, it was an emotional occasion. ‘Today we have […]
Posted on: May 25, 2022 by Alexander Herman
On 8 May, the exhibition Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution concluded at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Several of the pieces on display had been lent by collections in Russia, namely those of the Kremlin in Moscow and the Hermitage in St Petersburg. The exhibition, which opened on 20 November 2021, began in a […]
Posted on: May 16, 2022 by Elena Cooper
In February a new exhibition opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London about the painter and printmaker James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903): Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan, which runs until 22 May 2022, before moving to the National Gallery of Art, Washington (3 July to 22 October 2022). The centre-piece of the […]
Posted on: March 28, 2022 by Richard Harwood QC
In The Rustat Memorial, Jesus College, Cambridge [2022] ECC Ely, the college authorities proposed to remove a memorial to a seventeenth century benefactor, Tobias Rustat, from the grade I listed chapel. The concern was Rustat’s involvement in the slave trade, as an investor in two companies, and the effect which retaining his memorial in the […]
Posted on: March 24, 2022 by Paul Stevenson
Media outlets last week revealed that scientists had found the wreck of Endurance more than a century after she sank in the Weddell Sea, a find many had claimed to be impossible. The find has been hailed by marine archaeologists around the world. The BBC reports that Mensun Bound, a member of the expedition team, […]
Posted on: February 10, 2022 by Emily Gould
Last September, I had the pleasure of sharing on the blog the wonderful story of the return of a long-lost treasure to the local museum of my home county of Rutland in the UK’s East Midlands. Little did I think that less than six months later, I would again be writing about England’s smallest county, […]
Posted on: September 1, 2021 by Alexander Herman
On 9 August a decision came down from the High Court of England and Wales that imparts an important lesson about limitation periods and related timelines for the service of proceedings. The decision also reveals useful information about a particular dispute over allegedly fake antiquities, showing just what happens when negotiations between buyer and seller […]
Posted on: July 20, 2021 by Emily Gould and Alyssa Weitkamp
On 28th June, the UK Government published further guidance on the application of anti-money laundering (AML) rules to the UK art trade. As many readers will be aware, since January 2020, anti-money laundering regulations have applied to art market participants, or AMPs (traders or intermediaries involved in the sale or purchase of works of art […]
Posted on: July 15, 2021 by Elena Cooper
This month sees the opening of a major new exhibition of the work of the artist James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, which holds one of the largest Whistler collections in the world: Whistler: Art and Legacy (9 July-31 October 2021). In this blog, I reflect on how one painting by […]