Posted on: April 3, 2023 by Alexander Herman
An incredible piece of news dropped on the rather inauspicious time of Friday afternoon. This was the announcement of a plan by the National Portrait Gallery in London (NPG) and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to jointly acquire the famous ‘Portrait of Omai’ by Joshua Reynolds (left), a work that has been export deferred […]
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 […]
Posted on: March 27, 2019 by Rebecca Hawkes-Reynolds
Searching for treasure and discovering new archaeological sites like Indiana Jones is every child’s dream. And this is exactly what Cadbury’s latest Freddo campaign sought to do. The relevant webpage listed a series of known archaeological sites in England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland where “treasure is fair game”, and encouraged children to […]
Posted on: October 9, 2015 by Alexander Herman
Following on from my last post about two recent reports from the UK’s Spoliation Advisory Panel (SAP) regarding Nazi-looted art in British public collections, it was reported this summer that Glasgow City Council has followed an earlier SAP recommendation in relation to a 16th century tapestry fragment held at the city’s Burrell Collection. The November 2014 report recommended that an ex gratia payment (literally meaning […]
Posted on: September 25, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
A change to the law in Scotland could have an impact on objects left at museums, where the owner has disappeared or has become untraceable. The draft bill before the Scottish Parliament would first seek to introduce a 20 year positive prescription period, whereby a possessor of corporeal movable property (i.e. an object like a painting) would […]
Posted on: March 13, 2015 by Alexander Herman
The British Museum has an upcoming exhibition of art and artefacts from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders entitled Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilization set to open on 23 April 2015. However, as one recent Guardian article makes clear, all is not well in relations between the museum and representatives of certain indigenous groups, namely the Dja Dja Wurrung people of central Victoria. This […]
Posted on: February 3, 2015 by Ruth Redmond-Cooper
The Institute of Art & Law was happy to participate in a conference entitled Copyright and Cultural Heritage 2.0, hosted by The Scotsman and Shepherd & Wedderburn solicitors, in association with the Scottish Council on Archives. The conference took place at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. On the agenda were a number of issues […]
Posted on: June 2, 2014 by Alexander Herman
As reported here late last year, the famed City of Adelaide ship had been set to leave Scotland for its name city, Adelaide in South Australia. The Australian group seeking its relocation, Clipper Ship City of Adelaide Ltd [CSCoAL], had obtained an Open General Export Licence supposedly for this purpose. The ship left and after a brief stop […]