Tag Archives: art

How to look after paintings

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Pictures, like small children, prefer consistency of treatment. In the case of paintings and watercolours this means no violent fluctuations in temperature or humidity.

If you have a damp room a de-humidifier can bring the relative humidity down to around 40%-60%, above this level and there is a possibility of mould growing on surfaces and this can stain the paper on which watercolours, drawings and prints have been worked, irrevocably. Some moisture in the air is good, especially for inlaid furniture and panel pictures. I was in the Pinacoteca in Bologna 40 years ago, where there was about zero relative humidity and the great wooden altarpieces were groaning like ships’ timbers, as they dried out and moved. It’s not like that now!

water damage - caring for paintings

Hanging paintings above radiators or chimney breasts is to be avoided as the paint layer dries out and becomes brittle and if the painting is on a panel it can warp. The same applies to furniture.

Direct sunlight is a no-no, especially for watercolours. I remember seeing a large pair of watercolours by Turner hanging in a lightwell. They had been there since 1800 when the owner’s forbear had bought them at Christie’s. I tracked the sale. Instead of being worth £200,000 (they were obviously very early ones) they were worth about £5,000 as curiosities. All the colour had been bleached out – no blues, no greens, just pale pink and brown smudges. What a tragedy!

light damage on a painting

Whether light travels in waves or pulses, it equals heat and this will damage anything subjected to it. Ultra violet inhibiting strips can be put on windows, but they are only about 60% effective and should not be exclusively relied upon. Old-fashioned velvet curtains, with brass rods stretched through the bottoms are an ideal way of protecting watercolours in daytime and can, be turned back at night.

Artificial lighting can be harmful too, although it lacks the sun’s power, so low energy bulbs should be used and try to avoid picture lights on brass arms attached to the frame of an oil painting. They are too close to the surface of the painting and can cause stress to an old carved and gilded frame.

The cleaning of all paintings must be left to well-trained professional conservators. It is a highly complex procedure requiring in-depth knowledge of chemistry. Never use a damp cloth to clean the gilding on a frame. If it is water-based gilding, as opposed to oil, it will dissolve. A feather duster is preferable to a cloth duster as it is less likely to snag the carving and pull it off. You can dust the surface of an oil painting, very gently, with a cloth duster.

caring for paintings - feather duster

Lastly, never dust the glass on a pastel, it can cause static electricity to build up and the pastel (powdery chalk), which was never treated with a fixative in the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries, will jump off the paper and adhere to the inside of the glass!

Some things you just have to live with such as houseflies whose poo can stain an oil painting and can only be removed with a scalpel (don’t try this yourself!).

Thunderflies, in high summer, can find their way under the tightest-fitting glass and litter the surface of a watercolour or drawing. Wait until autumn and take the backing off the work on paper, dust them out and reseal. Silverfish are a menace. If they get into a Victorian watercolour they can munch their way through the pigments, which have been impregnated with gum Arabic (the substance that Osama Bin Laden’s family fortune was based on) leaving patches of bald paper. Try to keep on top of silverfish by regular hoovering.

It is a very good idea to have your paintings regularly valued, which will involve keeping a good photographic record. This could prove very useful to a conservator and loss adjuster should you have the misfortune to have water or fire damage.

The Nude

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For the next in my series of articles on what inspires artist to paint, I have chosen The Nude. This is such a vast subject, that I intend to look at Western Art, exploring only paintings from the Renaissance to the present day. Of course sculpture has a very important part to play in the history of The Nude, but for the most part, I am going to ignore it for brevity’s sake.

Sir Kenneth Clark, as he was then, in his brilliant book “The Nude”, (published by John Murray 1956), begins chapter one thus:

“The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguished between the naked and the nude. Naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenceless body, but of a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed.”

Since classical antiquity, the human body has been central to art. We are mostly familiar with sculpture, as so little painting has survived. During the Renaissance, excavations of ancient sites in Rome, Naples and elsewhere unearthed a vast treasure trove of naked gods and goddesses.

These antiquities invited scholars, collectors and artists alike to embrace a classical notion of ideal beauty and Diana, Venus, Danae, Sea Nymphs and various other creations of Greek and Roman mythology became a rich seam for admirers of the nude to mine. Gods and goddesses seldom wore clothes!

The Bible, too has a store of subjects involving the nude from Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to Lot and his daughters and Bathsheba.

The obvious potential for eroticism, was reduced by certain conventions in depicting the nude. The bodies, although adult, were hairless and had the look of polished marble rather than flesh – the look of a classical statue, as opposed to a “page 3” girl. This anodyne look, with a few subtle variations, lasted until the mid-19th Century.

There was a convention that allowed little boys to be painted completely naked and they are, frequently, as Cupid and Putti (winged cherubs). Little girls, however, have their lower abdomens covered by draperies. Sometimes adult females are draped too but the folds in the draperies often merely accentuate what is hidden.

The 17th Century ushers in a new aesthetic in Western painting. The dramatic light and shade of Caravaggio’s art in Italy found its way to the North of Europe, via Utrecht artists who worked in Rome. Rembrandt was one who embraced this new realism. When he painted his mistress, Hendrikje Stoffels, as “Bathsheba at Her Bath”, she is very much a woman of flesh and blood. Rembrandt records her rather large feet and hands and slightly tubby torso. He also includes the lump in her left breast, which may have been the cause of her death, aged 39, but her death may have been caused by the Plague, which killed thousands in Amsterdam in 1663. In any event, she is nothing like the classical ideal nude of a century earlier.

With the painting of François Boucher in 18th Century Paris, we return to a notion of ideal beauty. Against a background of political and social turmoil, Boucher depicts a world where elegant and beautiful gods and goddesses float and frolic blissfully.

In the 19th Century painters had a new and potentially devastating invention to contend with, photography. What could a painter do, that a photograph could not? The answer is, interpret the object in front of it, rather than merely record it, which is why, nearly 200 years after the invention of photography we still have war artists.

Édouard Manet’s “Olympia”, exhibited at The Paris Salon in 1865, is partly a return to the ideal, with Olympia’s marmoreal body, but it is also a snapshot of the moment her maid arrives with a bunch of flowers.

In England, three decades after Olympia, John William Godward is painting Campaspe as a living sculpture. She is not as pale as Olympia, but she is definitely statuesque and conventional, to conform with Victorian sensibilities. It is worth remembering that some Victorians draped the legs of their pianos, as legs were suggestive – of what I wonder? Furthermore, librarians separated books by male and female authors, lest they jostle against one another on the bookshelves – I think I know what they are getting at, the possibility of two books turning into a library.

Now we come to the 20th Century, when, as we all know, the rule book is thrown out of the window. There is no norm. Whilst Amadeo Modigliani, is painting an ideal nude, inspired by Italian Renaissance painting, Picasso is producing Cubist nudes in strokes of muted grey and Egon Schiele is producing sexually explicit nudes, which still have the power to shock profoundly and are the subject of censorship in many parts of the world. I’m not going to illustrate one!

Surrealism, of course, has its own take on the nude and Rene Magritte’s “Attempting the Impossible” of 1928 has the artist wearing a brown suit painting a living female nude model in 3-D, standing in the same space that he occupies. It is a witty take on Art imitating Art. The model is little more than a painted statue.

No Study of The Nude is complete without an in depth look at the work of Lucian Freud, a man obsessed with the nude, although he hated the word. In his maturity, he possessed a technique which uses thick impasto (paint) with light scumbles (like light washes) over the top to create a sense of the colour and texture of living flesh. Freud’s sitters are as far removed from the ideal as it is possible to be. The men often appear vulnerable and awkward, as do many of his women.

Sue Tilley, the model for one of his most famous nude portraits, “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping”, became a muse for him in the 1990s. The painting of her asleep on a sofa in Freud’s studio is a masterpiece of observation, empathy and reportage. She is seen from above, lying on his sofa, and the sense of her volume and the space she occupies is breathtaking. She sold at Christie’s for $33.6M, which, at the time, was the world record for a living artist.

The Nude has provoked much thought and inspired the spilling of litres of ink over the centuries. The Guerilla Girls, a group of anonymous American female artists produced a poster of Ingres’ “Grande Odalisque”, a white-skinned female nude seen from behind, with a gorilla’s head and in bold type posed the question: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” It went on to say “Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female”.

Through all the convulsions and twists that art has taken from the Renaissance, through Abstraction to the modern day, it is interesting to reflect that Life Classes, drawing the human body using a live model, still go on in every corner of the globe. There are three within a five mile radius of where I live ! To be able to draw the human form is clearly the starting point of all art.

World record prices at auction for the artists mentioned:

Lucas Cranach £9.43M
Cavaliere d’Arpino £325,000
Rembrandt van Rijn £20.2M
François Boucher $2.4M
Édouard Manet $65.126M
John William Godward £1.3M
Amadeo Modigliani $170M
Pablo Picasso $179M
Rene Magritte £59.4M
Lucian Freud $86.2M

New York Leads the Way in Old Masters

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The recent Old Master Sales in New York, at the end of January, were in marked contrast to the December results in London. For a start, there were many more sales, three of them single owner catalogues, but then there are probably more serious collectors of Old Masters in the New York and Boston areas, than the rest of the world put together!

The combined sales of Christie’s and Sotheby’s totalled $171.5M (£139.4M), beating the previous New York record of $133M (£97.1M), achieved in 2021 and dwarfing the £51.05M for London in December.

Apart from the huge number of good collections and collectors in the Eastern Seaboard of the USA, a minor contributing factor to the success of that arena, is that New York is the favoured destination for UK dealers to place their “sleepers” (discoveries), which, like all paintings, will forfeit 20% of their gross profit if sold in the UK. The USA is treated as an export sale and, therefore, is exempt for dealers operating under “The Special Scheme” for art and antiques.

I have chosen three pictures from these sales to illustrate, because they are the three I would most like to take home, perhaps in my next life.

The continued strengthening of prices for Old Masters means that anyone who owns one should consider having it revalued.

10 Celebrities who you never knew were artists!

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‘Never judge a book by its cover’ – that’s what we’re always told. We never know what’s really happening beneath someone’s public persona – and none more so than with famous actors or musicians, who we think we know so well through their film or music. But this fame and celebrity can often be misleading as many of the most famous celebrities have kept a secret from their fans – the secret being that they are artists (painters, photographers, sculptors) independent of their day jobs. In fact, in some case, the celebrities identify more as visual artists than their more famous personas!

Below are 10 celebrities who might surprise you with their double life!

David Bowie

David Bowie was undoubtedly one of the greatest creative forces of the 20th century, known for his ability to effortlessly reinvent himself over and over. It’s not surprising, therefore, that his creativity was also multifaceted and that he was a practicing visual artist for as long as he was a musician. Until 1994, however this side of his work remained unknown to the public. For the glam icon, painting was an essential part of the musical process.

As he explained during a conversation with The New York Times in 1998: ‘I’ll combine sounds that are kind of unusual, and then I’m not quite sure where the text should fall in the music,’ he explained, ‘Or I’m not sure what the sound conjures up for me. So then I’ll go and try and draw or paint the sound of the music. And often, a landscape will produce itself.’

Bowie was also a devoted art collector, and he had a close affinity with the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

‘I feel the very moment of his brush or crayon touching the canvas, there is a burning immediacy to his ever-evaporating decisions that fires the imagination ten or fifteen years on, as freshly molten as the day they were poured onto the canvas. It comes as no surprise to learn that he had a not-so-hidden ambition to be a rock musician. His work relates to rock in ways that very few other visual artists get near.’

Jim Carrey

Jim Carrey’s comedy and movie background is already legendary, but most people don’t realise that he is also an artist with a number of public exhibitions under his belt! Carrey has been drawing and painting since childhood, and not surprisingly considering his sharp wit and edgy sense of humour, his art is highly political and satirical; criticising and digging into the woes of modern-day America. Carrey is both a painter, sculptor and print maker.

In common with many of his actor / artist contemporaries, Carrey uses his art to ground and settle him, to enable him to switch off. As he says, ‘When I sculpt and paint is when I feel the most present and in harmony with the environment; as if all time has been suspended, all gravity disappears.’

Bob Dylan

As if he wasn’t content with being one of the most iconic musicians of modern times, Bob Dylan has also established himself as a painter and sculptor of international acclaim. The ‘Blowin In The Wind’ singer has been given pretty much every award you can think of, including the Pulitzer Prize, The Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nobel Prize for Literature, an Oscar, and the National Medal of Arts.

Dylan dates the beginning of his work as a visual artist to the early 1960s. A few drawings reached the public gaze with album covers like Music from Big Pink (1968) and Self Portrait (1970), but it was not until 1974, that Dylan started to take his art serious. He spent two months studying art with Ashcan School tutor Norman Raeben, who philosophised the importance of ‘perceptual honesty’ – painting life as it as seen, not imagined. Dylan says of this time: ‘He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.’

The inspiration behind Dylan’s art are travels – the cities and towns he visits appear on the canvases he produces, interpreted in the brightly graphic, expressionistic style he has made his own. He says his art is about the instant moment of a place, person and time, and it has found enormous appeal with audiences worldwide. The combination of the Dylan name and his accessible imagery is a winning combination.

Dylan’s first major retrospective, Retrospectum, opened in the Modern Art Museum Shanghai in 2019/20 and was visited by over 100,000 people in the first three months. He is now represented by a number of heavy hitting international galleries such as Halcyon and Opera Galleries.

Dennis Hopper

From Hell’s Angels and hippies to the streets of Harlem, Dennis Hopper’s photography powerfully captures American culture and life in the 1960s, a decade of progress, violence and enormous upheaval.

Hopper carved out a place in Hollywood history, with roles in classic films like Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, True Romance and Easy Rider. He is less well known, though no less respected, for his work as a photographer.

In 2014 Hopper’s photographic work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in London – entitled: Dennis Hopper – The Lost Album. This exhibition brought together over 400 images, taken during one of the most creative periods of his life in the 1960s.

This was a decade of huge social and political change, and Hopper was at the eye of the storm. With his camera trained on the world around him he captured Hell’s Angels and hippies, the street life of Harlem, the Civil Rights movement and the urban landscapes of East and West coast America. He also shot some of the biggest stars of the time from the worlds of art, fashion and music, from Andy Warhol to Paul Newman.

Together, these images are a fascinating personal diary of one of the great countercultural figures of the period and a vivid portrait of 1960s America.

Lucy Liu

More commonly known for her roles in the movies Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels, as well as the TV show Elementary, the American actress Lucy Liu is also a very talented abstract artist. She has painted for years, under the pseudonym Yu Ling.

Liu’s interest in art began at the age of fifteen, when she started experimenting with collage and photography at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1990 with a B.A. degree in Asian Languages and Culture, before moving to Los Angeles to pursue her interest in acting. Her first solo exhibition, Unraveling, at Cast Iron Gallery in New York in 1993, was a photographic exhibition that earned her a grant to study at Beijing Normal University. Liu found this period in China to be extremely valuable, not only as an opportunity to learn more about her Chinese heritage, but also to expand her understanding of the symbolic potential of art. The trip became the subject of a body of work shown at her next one-person exhibition, Catapult, at Los Angeles’ Purple Gallery in 1997. Liu remained in Los Angeles for several years, during which time she continued to work in collage and photographic portraiture. She returned to New York City in 2004 and enrolled in painting classes at the New York Studio School from 2004-2007.

Ongoing conceptual concerns in Liu’s artwork have been the notions of security, salvation, and the long-term effects of personal relationships on our physical and emotional selves–themes that she addresses in painting, sculpture, collage, silkscreen, or the appropriation of discarded objects, which Liu recontextualizes in handmade constructions that function as reliquaries.

Her work has been featured in numerous gallery exhibitions and international art fairs, and is included in multiple private and corporate collections. Liu currently lives and works in New York City.

Paul McCartney

The Beatles were a true global phenomenon within contemporary culture – arguably the world’s most famous band, against who all other bands are measured. In addition to this, Paul McCartney is one of the most successful composers and performers of all time. He has written or co-written 32 songs that have reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and as of 2009, had sales of 25.5 million RIAAcertified units in the United States.

For more than thirty years, alongside his music career, McCartney has been a committed painter, finding in his work both a respite from the world and another outlet for his drive to create. His paintings were a very private endeavour until 1999 when he decided to share his artwork with a public exhibition and a book titled ‘Paul McCartney Paintings.’ His work is now represented by a number of galleries internationally.

McCartney’s works are full of intense colour and life – his paintings reveal McCartney’s tremendously positive spirit as well as a visual sophistication. The combination of techniques, such as scratching, wiping and applying paint directly from the tube, clearly documents on the one hand the artistic process as it takes place on the canvas but creates on the other hand the illusion of objective realism, with the elements air, water and earth. Faces abound in his paintings and humour plays against a more sombre imagery, while his landscapes radiate a sense of place.

Joni Mitchell

Think of Joni Mitchell and think primarily of her incredible career as a singer, songwriter and musical innovator, whose songs have helped define an era and generation. She has received many accolades, including nine Grammy Awards, and has released 19 studio albums. Much less has been written of her life as a painter. It might surprise fans to hear that Joni has always considered herself to be a painter first and a musician second!

Joni started painted extensively in the ’60s and has never stopped since, except for a few brief, ill-advised forays into photography in the 1980s. The ’60s paintings are almost exclusively portraits of those around her, often drawn from reproductions of sketchpad drawings made on the road or in recording studios. Those around her are mostly men: some of them lovers (Graham Nash, David Crosby), some friends and professional barometers (Neil Young, Bob Dylan), but for their cheery, empty impersonality, they might as well be strangers.

Stevie Nicks

Stevie Nicks, the evocative lead singer of the folk rock band Fleetwood Mac, has painted throughout her long career, but yet she says she doesn’t really think of herself as a painter. This modesty belies a body of work which almost perfectly reflects the essence of her music, and evokes the bucolic feel of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her paintings are at once folkish and deeply biblical.

‘They’re all angels,’ she said of her art. ‘I only draw angels. I started to draw when my best friend got Leukemia. And that’s what she’s left me. And so I know she’s really excited now because it has finally, after the last 9 years, come to fruition, and people have finally started appreciating it. But I never drew a thing before she got sick.’

Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone has been an icon in the film world for decades, best known for writing and starring in the blockbuster movie franchise Rocky. But few of his fans realise that he has been painting for almost as long as he has acted – nearly 50 years.

Stallone’s work has evolved over the decades, with later canvases veering towards abstract forms and a reduced colour palette of black, white, and red. Stallone cites the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, and Kasimir Malevich as his key influences, as well as Andy Warhol, for whom he famously posed in a series of photographic portraits in the 1980s. A prolific screenwriter, he often used art to help conceptualize his characters; including his 1970s painting Finding Rocky served as a means of entry into his character’s mindset. Stallone’s works have been featured in retrospective museum exhibitions in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nice, France.

Ronnie Wood

Who would have thought it, but this quintessential bad boy of rock ‘n roll has consistently found solace in art and has painted throughout his wild days in the Rolling Stones. Ronnie Wood says: ‘There is no kind of therapy like the one you have from starting a picture and then seeing it through to the end.’

Having received formal art training at Ealing College of Art, Ronnie has been a prolific painter since his teens. He has described painting as being like therapy and would create portraits of figures he admired. Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix and fellow band member Mick Jagger are just a few of those he has painted, along with other musicians, friends and family.

Varying his medium depending on the mood he wishes to evoke, Ronnie creates his original pieces in charcoals, oils, watercolours, spray paints, oil pastels and acrylics. His subjects range from band members and musicians he admires to close friends and self-portraits.

For Ronnie, music and art have always gone hand-in-hand, and the intensity that he brings to the guitar translates onto canvas and paper with rhythmic line and vibrant colour. Ronnie’s paintings are a record of his many talents and loves. One of the things he most enjoys is to paint the views from his farm in County Kildare Ireland and the horses he keeps in stables there, allowing him time to take time out from both the media attention that follows him everywhere and also work on his future projects, both with the Rolling Stones and other musicians, in a more secluded atmosphere.

‘I apply musical theory to my art. I build artworks in much the same way as studio overdubs, the more defined ones are things that stand out in the mix.’

The Art of Picasso

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Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973, which makes 2023 the 50th anniversary of his death. Incidentally it is also exactly 50 years since I started my career in the Art world at Thomas Agnew in Old Bond Street, where I first had the privilege of handling Picasso’s work.

Picasso was very much a polymath, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and all round genius who was always making art and is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of the Cubist movement and his groundbreaking works continue to captivate audiences around the world. On the 50th anniversary of his death, it is a time to reflect on his legacy and contribution to art and the world. Picasso’s works can be seen in many of the world’s most famous museums and galleries, and continue to inspire new generations of artists.

His impact on the art world continues to be felt today and many very well known and highly regarded artists have been influenced by Picasso’s groundbreaking style and innovative techniques, including:

  1. Georges Braque: A close collaborator of Picasso’s during the development of Cubism, Braque was deeply influenced by Picasso’s work and the two artists had a major impact on each other’s style.
  2. Juan Gris: A Spanish painter and sculptor, Gris was also a key figure in the Cubist movement and was heavily influenced by Picasso’s work.
  3. Henri Matisse: While Matisse is known for his distinctive style, he was also influenced by Picasso’s use of colour and form, and the two artists maintained a close friendship throughout their careers.
  4. Joan Miró: A Spanish surrealist artist, Miró was inspired by Picasso’s bold experimentation with form and colour, and the two artists were close friends.
  5. Frida Kahlo: While Kahlo is primarily known for her distinctive self-portraits, she was also influenced by Picasso’s innovative approach to portraiture and the two artists shared a close friendship.

Place and culture was a great influence on Picasso and he lived in many different places throughout his life, some of the most significant include;

  1. Barcelona, Spain: Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain, but spent much of his childhood and early artistic career in Barcelona.
  2. Paris, France: In 1904, Picasso moved to Paris, which was then very much seen as the centre of the art world, and he lived and worked there for many years. During this time, he was associated with the Cubist movement and developed many of his most famous works.
  3. Cannes and Antibes, France: After World War II, Picasso spent much of his time in the south of France, living and working in the towns of Cannes and Antibes.
  4. Mougins, France: In 1961, Picasso moved to the small town of Mougins in the south of France, where he lived until his death in 1973.

Pablo Picasso’s work can be divided into several distinct periods, each characterised by its own dominant colour palette. Some of the most well-known colour periods of Picasso’s work are:

  1. The Blue Period (1901-1904): During this period, Picasso’s works were primarily painted in shades of blue and blue-green, with themes of poverty, loneliness, and sadness.
  2. The Rose Period (1904-1906): This period saw a shift to warmer, pinkish hues, and the introduction of more playful themes such as circus performers and harlequins.
  3. The African-Influenced Period (1907-1909): In this period, Picasso was influenced by African art and started incorporating abstract and geometric shapes into his works, resulting in a bold and experimental style.
  4. The Analytical Cubism Period (1909-1912): During this period, Picasso and Georges Braque developed the style of Analytical Cubism, characterised by fragmented and abstracted forms.
  5. The Synthetic Cubism Period (1912-1919): This period saw a further simplification of form, with the use of cut-out paper and printed materials incorporated into the paintings.

While these are some of the most significant colour periods of Picasso’s work, it is important to note that Picasso was always experimenting and evolving, and his style changed frequently throughout his very long career of almost unceasing endeavour to make art.

Some of his most well-known works include:

There are dozens of exhibitions taking place around the globe all marking this major anniversary each taking a differing approach, the link below gives you a taste of their variety dates and locations, hopefully you will be able to get to see at least one of them to witness for yourself the energy and sheer creative genius of Pablo Picasso.

Click here to read more about the dozens of exhibitions worldwide marking the 50th anniversary of Pscasso’s death.

 

Art on Yachts

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What art to put in your super yacht and how to look after it, might seem to be the ultimate in first world problems, but due to the everincreasing growth of the yacht market, these questions are fast being real issues for many UHNW individuals, with a knock-on effect for the insurance industry.

Ownership of a luxurious super yacht has become the new status symbol for the ultra-wealthy, over taking ownership of a private jet which was the status symbol of 90s and early 2000s. The ability to cruise the Caribbean or the Mediterranean in total privacy in your own floating hotel, whilst simultaneously advertising loudly your enormous wealth carries much appeal to many ultra-wealthy.

Once you have your new super yacht – the decision of what you put in it in terms of artwork is the next challenge – the interiors must match the exterior in the glamour stakes! But housing art on a yacht in a maritime environment brings with it a unique set of concerns and issues – from theft to damage, from casual mishandling by inexperienced staff to the effect of salt in the atmosphere. There are a number of issues which need to be considered from the start when housing art on a yacht.

How to Protect Artwork on Board

With the strength of the art market pushing values ever upwards, it is not unusual for the value of art on board a super yacht to be worth millions of pounds. It is, therefore, essential that owners consider how best to protect their collection on board from damage, bearing in mind that a maritime environment brings with it a unique set of conditions which need to be taken into account. Clearly the most obvious of these factors are ‘physical forces’, such as the variable levels of movement caused by waves and wind. Other factors which can damage or harm artwork on board include:

  • Temperature variations
  • Excessive light and UV
  • Excessive humidity and salt
  • Pests
  • Pollutants
  • Water damage
  • Fire hazards
  • Thieves and vandals
  • Dissociation (the loss of information surrounding the object’s provenance or history)

The air quality and temperature within each room is important: humidity is bad for art, as is salt, air and direct sunlight – you always have to be aware of humidity and heat on board. The most effective way to counter these threats is to try to maintain as stable an environment on boards as possible. Luckily, modern super yachts are now designed with air-conditioning, lighting and humidity control systems that rival those found in art galleries.

As ‘physical forces’ like movement and vibrations are significantly greater at sea, on board artwork must be securely fastened to the yacht or hung with museum glue for extra secure installation. It is also important that owners consider the salinity of the air at sea and how this could affect artworks. In many cases, bespoke framing and cases can help prevent light and external damages as well – the purpose being to create as adding harmonious an environment on board as possible.

Installing Artwork on Yachts Correctly to Reduce the Risk of Damage

Installing artwork on board a moving boat is considerably more complicated than hanging a work of art in a static environment. It is not possible to simply hang a painting on board, not as simple as installing in a client’s house – it needs to be screwed to the wall and secured against sudden movement. The same applies for sculptures and objects, which all need to be fixed firmly and securely. Here ‘museum glue’ comes into play and – it is a clear product that fixes objects to surfaces (though not irrevocably) to stop them shifting in a swell.

Insurance and Security

A working alarm system is an obvious starting point and essential to gain insurance cover. Similarly, special alarm systems which alert the crew to atmospheric changes may be required for higher value collections.

Marine insurance policies are rarely standardised and general marine insurances will not normally cover artwork as a norm, so owners need to insure their artwork on board with a separate and specialist art policy. These policies often require an annual renewal inspection of both the artwork and the general environment in which it is housed, due to the specific nature of the environment on board a ship. Insurance companies generally expect owners to employ a professional art management service to guarantee maximum protection where all possible negative influences are avoided from day one.

It should also be remembered that many contain geographical navigational limits. Beyond such limits, the yacht will be off-cover unintentionally.

Other insurance clauses for art and super yacht owners to consider is that rules and taxation brackets vary between countries, with artwork to be imported and taxed under a ‘temporary admission basis.’ Different import tariffs apply depending on where the ship is physically when the artwork is imported and loaded on board. It is in the owner’s best interests to understand these variations as it will cost dearly if they get it wrong. Import tax rates for importing art in the EU and UK vary from 5% to 13% – a mistake in where art importation is registered can cost dearly.

Strict insurance requirements mean that even museums must fulfil high standards before important pieces are allowed to be shown and the same applies for a super yacht. As a rule of thumb, the more expensive the artwork, the more attention needs to be given to how it is transported, stored and displayed.

Staff Training

Damage to artwork by accident or mishap is one of the most common causes of insurance claims on artwork housed on a vessel. This is not surprising when one considers that most people have very limited experience in how to handle artwork. The scope for costly accidents to happen as a result of unintentional negligence is high and the most efficient way to counter this is to ensure that all staff receive specialist training on how to handle various types of artworks and what to do should an accident happen.

Often these actions are not complicated, and in some cases, they are just common sense, however, if all crew members are made aware of potential threats to artwork, then the risk of expensive mistakes is mitigated. Simple measures such as wearing art handling gloves, and knowing how to carry and store paintings efficiently sound basic but it’s at the core of successful collection management. Equally important is training in what to do in the event of an accident – often more damage can be done unwittingly post-accident than the accident itself. In most cases the less that is done to an object or artwork after an accident is better in the long run. Staying calm and assessing the situation before diving in is always recommended. The first point to note is that the crew should generally do absolutely nothing. Trying to fix something without the requisite skills can make matters worse.

There are a number of companies who can arrange flexible training course in on board collection management – most notably the UK based company ‘Art on Superyachts’. Courses can be developed which are both flexible and modular, which give an overview of the art world, the art market and what is involved in the study of art history. Additional art handling modules teach the management, care and handling of valuable objects on board along with the full scope of collectors’ services. The cost of focused training for yacht crews is a very wise investment for any yacht and art owner to make. Ultimately, awareness and vigilance are the key to protecting any on board art collections.

Year of the Rabbit – Rabbits in art

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To celebrate the Chinese New Year and the start of the Lunar New Year on the 22nd January we thought we would look at the rabbit, our friendly bunny.

So, what might we expect from this new year?

The rabbit is a symbol of longevity, peace, and prosperity in Chinese culture. 2023 is predicted to be a year of hope. People born in a Year of the Rabbit are believed to be vigilant, witty, quick-minded, and ingenious.

Rabbits have been seen as a symbol of sex and fertility since antiquity. In ancient Rome rabbits were frequently depicted as the animal of Venus. Conversely the rabbit was used by artists of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a symbol of sexual purity and was often depicted alongside the Madonna and Child.

For those wanting to celebrate the Year of the Rabbit, you can purchase a £5 gold coin from The Royal Mint. If you have something more elaborate in mind, Christian Dior have produced a watch for this auspicious year, which retails at £29,000.

We could, however, simply celebrate the role of the rabbit in art over many centuries. See how the furry creature has inspired artists throughout the years.

Wishing everyone a Happy Year of the Rabbit.

A review of the December Old Master Sales in London

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December is an exciting month, not just because Christmas is coming, it is also the last hurrah for the Old Master Painting season in London. Sotheby’s had the better pictures and therefore, the better of the results. Their Day Sale (lesser fry) at a total of £3.34M was roughly three times the value of Christie’s at £1.185M. Furthermore, Christie’s had a large total of lots unsold on the day, 40 out of 104 lots.

The Evening Sale (the top lots) followed a similar pattern with Sotheby’s sale to talling £32.72M, with Christie’s coming in at a more modest £13.14M. In fact, Sotheby’s top lot, Titian’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, at £11.1M made almost as much, on its own, as Christie’s whole sale.

They had a beautiful still life by the Haarlem painter Floris van Dijck, very similar in composition to the painting in the Rijksmuseum and one of my favourite pictures in that collection. This made £2.09M against a pre-sale estimate of £600,000-£800,000.

Also estimated at £600,000 – £800,000 was a dramatic seascape by Ivan Konstantinov Aivazovsky titled ‘The Wrath of the Seas’. I was particularly interested to see what happened to this painting, by a 19th Century Russian artist, bearing in mind what is going on in Ukraine. On the day it made a very healthy £1.729M, proving that Aivazovsky has an international reputation and is not just for local consumption!

During the view at Christie’s, I was intrigued to speculate what would happen to two portraits, in particular. The first was a portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII and the second was, to my mind, a very beautiful portrait of Henrietta Maria, by Sir Anthony van Dyck, court painter to Charles I.

In the event, they both disappointed with the Holbein making £1.12M against an estimate of £1-1.5M and the Van Dyck limping away at £2.44M against an estimate of £2-4M. The highest price was £2.92M (estimate £2-3M) for ‘Reading Party’ by the French Rococo artist Jean Francois de Troy.

These sales told us nothing new about taste for Old Masters, but they did reinforce what I said in July and that is that there is keen interest in paintings by good hands, fresh to the market and in good state. Selling lesser things, which have been seen before, is a struggle.

The Paul Allen collection

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In the same way that ‘location, location, location’ has historically underpinned great property investment, ‘quality, quality, quality’ has always lain at the heart of great art collecting. The strength of this strategy of only buying the very best proven crystal clear with the spectacular results achieved by the recent auction of the art collection amassed by the late Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen’s at Christie’s.

Split in two parts – Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Art Collection, was provocatively billed by Christie’s in their pre-sale marketing, ‘to be the largest and most exceptional art auction in history’, with predications that it would surpass $1 billion in sales for the first time in history, beating the $922.2m realised last by Sotheby’s in May last year’s Macklowe Collection.

Christie’s predictions turned out to be both true and conservative – Part I of the collection on 9th November saw 60 extraordinary works achieve a total of $1,506,386,000, with five paintings achieving prices above $100 million. The works in the sale sold 100 per cent by lot with 65 per cent of the lots selling above their high estimates. Part II of the collection on 10th November, went on to achieve an additional $115,863,500 for the remaining 95 works offered for sale. In total, the proceeds for the landmark series of sales, totalled and an extraordinary and ground-breaking $1,622,249,500 – all of which is being donated to the various charitable causes Paul Allen established and supported during his lifetime.

What makes the Allen collection so extraordinary, aside from the huge numbers attached to it, is that the collection was put together entirely by Allen himself in less than 30 years. The fact that a collection of such quality and size can still be amassed today, with so many masterworks being in museum collections and out of commercial circulation, is remarkable.

The scope of Allen’s collection is unusual in that it spanned more than 500 years, from Botticelli to Monet, from Picasso to Stella, from Seurat to Hockney. This breadth and variety of collecting is increasingly rare in today’s world, when most collectors tend to focus on a specific area of interest or particular artists, and develop collections which, although important, are more limited in their reach. Paul Allen’s collection and his method of collecting harks back to the height of American collecting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when legendary collectors such as Frick, Rockefeller and Getty scoured the world for masterpieces across all genre and eras – the only prerequisite being quality. This type of collecting is a truly American phenomenon and demonstrates that when there is the rare combination of ambition, taste and limitless money, great things can happen.

What sets the Paul Allen Collection apart from others is the also fact that Allen himself oversaw each and every purchase himself, without the help of the ubiquitous art advisor who is the mainstay of most billionaire collectors. This personal engagement in the collection, reflects Allen’s strong interest in world culture and history, and gives the collection a personality which only great collections possess. As Paul Allen said, “When you look at a painting you’re looking into a different country, into someone else’s imagination, how they saw it.”

It was a given that such an extraordinary collection was always going to achieve extraordinary things when offered at auction – since the market is avaricious for works of this level. Christie’s performed their part superbly, and ran a slick international marketing campaign that promoted the collection worldwide. The results were stupendous.

The highest price achieved in the sale was for Georges Seurat’s 1888 Pointillist masterpiece, Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version), which made $149.2m and smashed the previous Seurat world record by a multiple of four. The world icon is used far too often in modern parlance, but in this case, the word is truly deserved.

Similarly, Paul Cézanne’s 1880-1890 La Montagne Sainte-Victoire – a classic rendering of Cézanne’s most iconic of subjects – also smashed the $100m barrier, achieving $137.8m; and Gustav Klimt’s 1903 painting, Birch Forest, set a world record for a Klimt, selling for $104.6m.

Other notable sales included the highest price ever for a van Gogh painting, Verger avec cyprès, which sold for $117.2m. Paul Gauguin’s 1899, Maternité II made $105.7m, and Lucien Freud’s masterful portrait, Large Interior WII (after Watteau), made $86,265,000.

Further paintings by Éduard Manet, Pablo Picasso, David Hockney, Andrew Wyeth, and Georgia O’Keeffe, all went onto achieve strong prices, alongside sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder and Max Ernst.

In contrast to these masterpieces of Impressionist and Modern Art, the collection also featured a number of significant old master paintings – most notably, Sandro Botticelli’s exquisite, Madonna of the Magnificat, which sold for a ‘relatively’ affordable $48,480,000m, when one considers the rarity of fully autograph works by Botticelli on the market.

One work, Lot 131, demonstrates to me more than any other work, the personal nature of the collection, and the discerning eye of the Paul Allen himself. It also happens to be the most modest work offered for sale. Measuring only 21cm high, it is an exquisite but fragmented Renaissance sculpture showing clasped hands of the Virgin Mary, catalogued as Circle of Donatello. The fact that a man such as Allen, who could afford any masterpiece in the world, was also drawn to such an exquisite but unassuming work, indicates the level of his sophistication, and proves that quality, should lead a collector when buying a work. The market agreed, and the little gem made 26 times its lower estimate and made $252,000.

Winslow Homer

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I went to the Winslow Homer exhibition at the National Gallery last week and strongly recommend it to you. It is the first time his work has been shown en masse in the UK and there are no paintings by him in British Public Collections, despite his being a household name in the USA.

He started life painting scenes from the American Civil War and much of his work describes conflict, racial tensions, and other social problems. He also had a real obsession with the sea and spent nearly two years on the Northumbrian coast at Cullercoats, observing and recording the activities of the local fishing community and its struggle with the sea. For Homer, the sea was a source of pleasure, livelihood and terror depending on its mood. He painted numerous scenes of people being rescued from the tempestuous ocean.

I was very struck by a painting executed in 1904, which shows three men wearing sowesters and waterproofs in a rowing boat where the swell is so immense you can’t see the boat , and its title is ‘Kissing the Moon’. It reminded me of a passage in Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Typhoon,’ where the waves are so great the characters in the boat see the moon disappear below the horizon and when it returns to view, appears to be dripping water. I wondered if this book could have had an influence on Winslow, so I googled it! Conrad began the novel in 1899 and it was subsequently serialized in Pall Mall Magazine between January and March 1902. It was first published in book form by Putnam in New York in 1902, two years before Winslow Homer painted the picture. I think I have answered my own question.

Winslow Homers don’t come up for auction very often, only 68 in the last 35 years. The world record for him (at auction ) was achieved in November 2014, by Sotheby’s in New York, when Mrs Paul Mellon’s ‘Watching the tide go out’, a tiny canvas, just over 12 x 16 in , made $4.5m.