The only way to van Gogh

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Pop art ... Ludwig Museum, Cologne.

It is taking everything in my power not to burst into tears. I am in Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum staring into the harrowed eyes of one of the legendary master's famous self-portraits.

I defy anyone to remain cool when seeing their first van Gogh. 

Seeing the piece so close is an almost spiritual experience. The painter is so alive in the work, it's as if he's trapped in the agony of his self-hatred for eternity, and I want to dive in and rescue him.

Ruins ... the castle and old town of Heidelberg. 

I defy anyone to remain cool when seeing their first van Gogh. It's impossible not to be affected, sight and soul. 


The bipolar manic highs and unbearable depressive lows of the tragic short-lived Dutch painter's life are all there, in paint, from his earliest dark-shadowed The Potato Eaters to those familiar irises and sunflowers so radiant they set off their own heat.

It may come as no surprise to hear I am a van Gogh fan. After all, I have travelled across the world from Australia to the Netherlands in devotion to the great man's work. Yet my pilgrimage has been far from tough.

Imagine a luxurious cruise ship purring down the wondrous Rhine for eight days from Amsterdam to Frankfurt in Germany (you can also take the trip in reverse direction). Think of a five-star boutique hotel named the River Empress, only with moving postcard views, constant fine dining and a standard of service thought to be extinct along with flappers in the '30s.

Float into frame ... the Van Gogh Museum.

Picture some of the greatest architectural and other-worldly natural treasures of Europe within a short walk of the ship, and appreciating masters such as van Gogh on an almost daily basis, and you may start to gain an idea of just how decadent Uniworld's Springtime Tulips & the Rhine cruise is.

For someone like me, who has visited Europe before and has ticked off certain tourist must-sees, the cruise is even more ideal. Day one in Amsterdam, for example, I forfeit visiting the Anne Frank House for the Van Gogh Museum. Then, still not sated, I spend the afternoon on my own, gluttonously taking in even more masters at the Rijksmuseum, (van Goghs, Rembrandts and Vermeers) before walking back to the dock along Amsterdam's labyrinth of canals and flower markets via its infamous red-light district.

As exquisite as van Gogh's brush strokes may be, Mother Nature wins the beauty contest hands down the following day during a visit to Keukenhof gardens. Situated between Amsterdam and The Hague, in Lisse, 7 million flowers make up this world-renowned kaleidoscope of colour that began life as a castle herb garden in one-time hunting grounds of the 15th century.

Beauty contest ... Keukenhof Gardens.

Today, it is the most photographed place on the planet and the largest bulb flower park in the world, featuring 4.5 million tulips in 100 varieties. I take more than 200 photos and still could keep clicking, every turn more breathtakingly brilliant than the last.

Another easy excursion decision is made upon arriving in Arnhem - the Kroller-Muller Museum. Housing the second-largest collection of van Goghs (collector Helene Kroller-Muller bought 91), including the recently verified Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses, Kroller-Muller is a siren song I simply can't ignore.

The 55 square kilometres of the National Park De Hoge Veluwe (hogeveluwe.nl) hosts not only the Kroller-Muller Museum and its sublime sculpture gardens but the deer and wild boars the wealthy art collector Anton Muller so enjoyed hunting in the 1900s.

Muller enjoyed his forays into the forest so much he decided to make himself a little more comfortable by building the St Hubert Hunting Lodge, which still stands like a grand startled elk in its silent park surrounds today.

A visit to the hunting-themed home is an interesting precursor to the museum, icing on an already rich cake. 

Housed in yet another modern architectural masterwork, this time by esteemed Henry van de Velde, the Kroller-Muller (kmm.nl) collection ranges from Seurat, Picasso, Mondrian and Leger to the renowned contemporary European artists of today.

Featuring sculptures from the 19th century to now, including Rodin, Moore, Hepworth, Merz and Dubuffet, the gardens are so vast it takes me a (complimentary) meandering bike ride through the lush surrounds to fit it all in.

Cruising on to Cologne and taking a walking tour of this 2000-year-old city, I once again branch off to visit its museums on my own (or as many as I can - there are 42). Standouts are the Museum Ludwig, which houses the biggest pop-art collection outside the US (Warhols and Lichtensteins at every turn); the Romano-Germanic Museum (check out the famous Roman floor mosaic); and the surprisingly vast and varied collections at the Kolumba and Wallraf-Richartz museums.

The visit isn't complete without stopping in and smelling the original cologne formula created in Farina House, now a fragrance museum.

It is past Marksburg that the Rhine begins to resemble fairytales and fables, with castles and forts perched high on cliffs, and there's no better place to see it than sitting on deck with a champagne cocktail or lying in your stateroom with the windows open, the cyclists on the nearby banks so close they wave.

We move on once more, to Frankfurt and another Germany altogether. But rather than settle back into this century, I opt for an excursion to nearby Heidelberg to tour its castle. The history of the castle, built before AD1214, is a fascinating ride from grandeur to rubble and back again.

It is only fitting that the last day is rooted back in reality, wandering the modern money mecca that is Frankfurt (home to the euro). But what Frankfurt lacks in quaint charm it makes up in museums and galleries, the Stadel being its ultimate.

Featuring 700 years of art from old masters (Raphael, Rembrandt and Vermeer), modern (Renoir, Cezanne, Monet, Degas, Picasso and Munsch) to contemporary (Bacon, Richter, Warhol and Baselitz), something magical and profound happens to me within its walls.

His name is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, one of the German leaders of expressionism in the 20th century, and I fear it is love. Another true tragic, Kirchner had more than 600 of his works destroyed by the Nazis in 1937, leading him to commit suicide the following year.

And so, I find myself once again obsessed with an artist. Re-stack my mini bar ... I shall be back.

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Film explores the shady death of Van Gogh using 54,000 hand-painted frames

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Vincent Van Gogh was no slouch -- he produced some 900 paintings -- but Breakthru Films is revisiting Van Gogh's art on an industrial scale. It is creating 54,600 oil paintings to make feature-length animated film Loving Vincent -- think A Scanner Darkly, but using real paint. "The paintings are the centre of the story," says Hugh Welchman, managing director of the Oscar-winning, Poland-based studio. "Without them, what's the point? It would be like Amadeus without music."

The process combines high- and low-tech. When pre-production began last year, each painting took two-and-a-half hours to produce; that time is now down to 45 minutes. Welchman, 37, hopes to further reduce this before full production starts next year. 

The film, scheduled for release in 2015, is a murder mystery about Van Gogh's death; the subjects of his final paintings, who were close to the artist, become its protagonists. "You're not sure who's guilty and who's not," Welchman says. 

"They try to convince you that they knew him better, but they could have a reason to be implicated with his death."

 (This article was taken from the September 2012 issue of Wired magazine.)

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Susan Sellers combines signs with plein air painting

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Susan Sellers, a plein air painter who has her studio in Edgartown, created this portrait of Lynn Murphy's tractor.

Susan Sellers has 35 years under her belt running Sellers Signs and providing homeowners and boat owners as well as Island businesses with signs. But she has a second day job as an oil painter. For more than ten years she has been building her creds in the fine arts field as a plein-air painter.

Growing up in the Washington D.C., area, Ms. Sellers was a natural for a career that would end up combining sign painting and fine art. One of her grandfathers was an architect and the other, a signmaker. Drafting always interested her, and in high school she was usually the only girl studying mechanical drawing or woodworking. 

She went on to study at  George Washington University, the Corcoran School of Art and the Maryland Institute of Art. Along the way, Ms. Sellers started working as a draftsman for architects and engineers. A job in that field brought her to the Island.

Fine-art painting always remained part of the mix, though, and she has moved it increasingly out of the sidelines.

Ms. Sellers paints in oil and prefers to work outdoors, or plein air, to create her expressionist landscapes. Over the years, she has participated in shows at Dragonfly Gallery in Oak Bluffs, Featherstone Center for Arts, and at the annual Family Planning Show. Last year she donated a painting to the Martha's Vineyard Hospital. Her Edgartown home on Pennywise Path, which she designed herself, doubles as her gallery.

Like many Vineyarders, Ms. Sellers spent 10 years doing the annual shuffle from one rental to another. Buying land started the process of acquiring a home of her own. A building where she maintains her sign business stands next to her house and is almost as large.

"Everything I do is a solitary endeavor," Ms. Sellers says. By basing her studio in her home, she can move more easily between her two jobs and have the chance to interact with the public.

The names of the paintings hanging on the walls of her house provide a litany of favorite Vineyard spots. One depicts Cow Bay with a storm coming; another shows Lynn Murphy's tractor; a third, the iconic gas pump on North Road. Menemsha is another favorite subject.

Once she completes a painting on site, Ms. Sellers tries not to touch it again. "I'm not one of those painters who goes back into the studio and fusses with it," she says. "It's more an expressionist process. I'm not trying to be a photo-realist."

Maine is a popular destination for her, and her repertoire of paintings includes spots like Sebasco Point and the Kennebago River in that state. She loves Maine's weather and thinks of the state as a Martha's Vineyard without the tourists. Not that Ms. Sellers would quit the Vineyard. She describes herself as ingrained in the Island community.

"There's this thing that happens when you're creating, where you feel like a vehicle, that is the most amazing feeling," Ms. Sellers says of her painting. "It's just magical. I'm always looking for that." Her works display a lushness and freedom that contrast sharply with the exactitude demanded by her work sign painting.

"The more you get out of the way and let it go, the better," she says, welcoming the change of pace that painting outdoors gives her from sign painting. "I'm still an emerging artist. I'm not always going to be painting only plein air. I'm still getting my sea legs with painting."

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Total eclipse of the art - King’s Lynn woman hopes Bonny Tyler painting by Rolf Harris will fetch £50k

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  Cathy Sims, who was given a Rolf Harris painting of Bonnie Tyler by her father when she was a child, which was later valued at £50,000 on the Antiques Roadshow.

 

Now Lynn mum Cathy Sims is hoping the portrait of the singer by Australian entertainer Rolf Harris will fare better when it goes under the hammer again later this year.

The artwork had been valued at £50,000 by an art expert but fell short of its £30,000 reserve price when it was auctioned at Barry Hawkins Auctioneers in May.

The office manager said: “The painting is going to be auctioned at another auctioneers which sold a Rolf Harris painting a few weeks before mine was auctioned. They are trying to get two Rolf Harris paintings from Australia and it looks like my painting will be linked with them and they will all be auctioned together in October.

“I really think it will sell this time because there will also be an Internet auction this time which we didn’t have before and is usually how Rolf Harris paintings are sold.”

Auctioneer Alastair McPhie-Meiklejon, from John Taylor auction house in Louth, Lincolnshire, confirmed he was in discussions to sell her painting and said Rolf Harris was a “desirable” artist.

“He is not just a chap who did TV programmes and did a bit of painting on the side, he is now respected as an artist in his own right,” he added.

Miss Sims was given the picture by her father when she was six years old after he bought it for £50 at a charity auction at Sutton Bridge, Lincolnshire. It was only after her father died in 2005 that she decided to research the artwork and discovered its story. She then took the picture to the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow last year and was told the portrait was worth up to £50,000. 

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Turning Points in Picasso's Life Are Portrayed in Two Films

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Pablo Picasso

Two events in Pablo Picasso’s life, a quarter of a century apart, are at the heart of new movies by two of Spain’s veteran directors. 

Carlos Saura is preparing “33 Dias,” which will focus on the artist’s emotional upheaval in 1937, when he painted “Guernica,” his harrowing representation of the bombing of a Basque town that has come to symbolize the outrage of warfare. 

And in the autumn, Fernando Colomo is to release “La Banda Picasso,” about how Picasso found himself entangled in the stunning theft in 1911 of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in Paris. 

While the Mona Lisa was eventually recovered and found to have been stolen by a Louvre employee, Picasso was initially suspected of having taken part in the theft, which affected his relationship with some of the other artists working in Paris. 

It destroyed his friendship with Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet who ultimately helped clear Picasso of any involvement but in the process was forced to accept responsibility for another theft. 

Turbulent relationships also marked Picasso’s life at the start of 1937, when he accepted a commission for the Paris Universal Exposition from Spain’s Republican government, then fighting a civil war against the Fascist troops of General Francisco Franco. 

“The scope of this ‘Guernica’ project got a lot broader after looking more closely at this huge sentimental conflict,” Mr. Saura said. Besides having to juggle the women competing for his attentions, the director added, “‘Guernica’ really came at a time when Picasso was short of artistic inspiration and had real doubts about the direction of his work.” 

Although delving into Picasso’s relationships required some fictional interpretation, Mr. Saura and Mr. Colomo each said that they had broadly aimed to stick to the facts. Both movies, which will be in Spanish and French, are initially scheduled for European distribution. 

Mr. Colomo, 66, spent about eight years researching and preparing his script, reading during that time almost 100 books on Picasso, so that “this movie has probably required more work than all my previous 19 films combined.” 

Still, in the case of the Mona Lisa theft, “the story itself is so weird and surreal that I’m sure many spectators will think that it’s mostly fiction,” Mr. Colomo said. 

Picasso’s work on “Guernica” has been extensively documented, not least by Dora Maar, whose photographs can be seen near the painting in the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. The painting itself has recently undergone another major restoration and investigation effort, using infrared and ultraviolet photography taken by a computer-controlled robot to discover scratches and other signs of damage as well as reveal any previously unknown preparatory drawings or touch-ups. 

Mr. Saura has scheduled nine weeks of shooting, starting in October, split between the town of Guernica and Paris. 

Mr. Colomo’s movie was shot in six weeks late last year in Budapest, with a cast of newcomers and a budget of €4 million, or $5 million. “The cinema industry is now suffering so much in this financial crisis that not a single minute of filming can be wasted,” he said. 

Coincidentally, both movies have lead actors who come from Málaga, Picasso’s birthplace. Mr. Colomo cast Ignacio Mateos, who has worked for the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris. Mr. Saura’s Picasso is the Spanish superstar Antonio Banderas. Gwyneth Paltrow (who speaks Spanish) plays Maar. “What’s fascinating about Dora Maar is that she wasn’t just the friend but also the visual witness of Guernica,” Mr. Saura said. 

For Mr. Banderas, who has appeared in two of Mr. Saura’s movies, “it’s a great opportunity to do something very different to what he has done before and get to interpret a very complex character,” Mr. Saura said. 

As for the physical resemblance, “I think that he will end up looking a lot like Picasso, with the same stare and terrible accent in French,” he said. In Ms. Paltrow’s case, he added, “The fact that her appearance isn’t as similar doesn’t worry me as much because far fewer people actually know what Dora Maar looked like.” 

Having started out as a photographer, Mr. Saura, 80, has directed some of the most acclaimed Spanish movies of the past five decades, “Cousin Angélica” and “Carmen” among them, and has won awards at the Berlin and Cannes film festivals. 

His interest in painting led him to make a 1999 movie about Francisco Goya, called “Goya in Bordeaux.” Mr. Saura’s brother, Antonio, was a leading Spanish painter who knew Picasso. 

“My brother always said that the toughest moment for a painter is having to stand in front of a blank canvas,” Mr. Saura said, “which is also the kind of problem that I have repeatedly had as a film director and certainly what Picasso was facing until the news of the Guernica bombing gave him a trigger to really want to get down to work.”

Mr. Colomo is best known as a director of comedies, following “Paper Tigers,” his 1977 feature debut. He too is passionate about painting, and some of his own work hangs on the office walls of his production company in Madrid. 

“As a teenager, all I wanted to do is become a Cubist painter — until I finally understood that this would be difficult since the movement had died,” he said with a laugh. Beside his interest in painting, Mr. Colomo said that he had been intrigued by how his own experiences as a movie director bore some resemblance to the volatile relationships between Picasso, Apollinaire and some of the other Paris artists a century ago. 

“Picasso and all the others were in a survival struggle, fighting cold and hunger, despite the romantic notion that is now given to their time in Paris,” Mr. Colomo said. “In the world of arts, everybody starts out being friends, struggling to overcome the same obstacles, but as careers begin to follow different paths and at different speeds, the generosity and solidarity somehow fade away.” 

Ultimately, when questioned by a judge over the Mona Lisa theft, Picasso denied even knowing Apollinaire. But Apollinaire took responsibility for a separate theft of two ancient stone statues from the Louvre, which he had helped organize at Picasso’s request. 

Picasso had seen the statues and was so inspired by them that he asked Apollinaire to help smuggle them to his studio. He used the statues to compose “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (The Young Ladies of Avignon), one of his most famous paintings. 

“A great friendship was somehow sacrificed for the sake of Picasso’s art,” Mr. Colomo said. 

Mr. Saura also views Picasso as an artist who never let anything get in the way of his work, whatever the consequences for his relationships. 

“Of course Picasso admire women, but he was above all a tireless worker who lived for his painting,” Mr. Saura said. “I think that if he hadn’t been so egoistical, he simply wouldn’t have managed to produce the work that he did.” 

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Picasso And Modern British Art, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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Picasso's 'A Child with a Dove'.

IN 1960, the Surrealist artist, jazz musician and great British character, George Melly received an invitation to a royal reception at the Tate Gallery to mark the opening of its major Picasso retrospective.

The guest of honour was the Duke of Edinburgh, the dress code formal: “Tails are expected… medals will be worn.” 

Melly, to put it simply, went ballistic. He wrote in protest to Roland Penrose, the Tate Trustee and great British champion of Picasso’s art who had organised the exhibition. Melly signed off “yours disgustedly” after raging at what he called a “shabby and opportunistic little marriage of art and establishment”. 

You can read the original typewritten letter in one of the final cases of Picasso And Modern British Art, the summer blockbuster that charts Picasso’s impact on the artists of these isles. “I do hope you will enjoy the little jokes HRH will presumably make in front of the pictures,” Melly thunders. “Perhaps he will suggest that Prince Charles could do ­better.”

The show achieved 460,000 visitors and Picassomania gripped the nation. Five years of hard work later, Penrose finally achieved a lifelong ambition to acquire a really good Picasso for the gallery. The Three Dancers, a 1925 painting that Picasso treasured and regarded as one of his two most important works, was bought for £60,000. 

It is hanging in Edinburgh till November and it’s a hell of a work – three anguished figures trapped in a macabre dance of death, the central figure almost crucified. There are voids where there should be flesh and what flesh there is flattened against the oppressive patterned walls. 

Picasso thought this painting better than Guernica, second only to Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, the work that blew 20th century painting apart. Did Penrose get thanked for it? Well hardly. In the same room as the painting you can read the press reports of the furious criticism in the House of Lords.

Picasso And Modern British Art is a brilliant historical exhibition, charting Picasso’s reception in Britain from 1910 to 1960, but it’s a bit of a sorry story. And the sorry bit is really our own. 

Last week, for example, a poster advertising this summer’s exhibition, an image of the painting Woman In A Red Armchair (1932), was covered up by lily-livered management at Edinburgh Airport, only to be subsequently reinstated. 

The mainstream British art world was slow to understand the monumental kick up the bahookie that art had received, taking decades to acquire ­decent works for public collections. 

Figures like Melly represented a counter-culture that held Picasso dear, but couldn’t seem to expand on or capitalise on his revolutionary capacities. But most galling of all were the difficulties that most British artists experienced in doing anything other than swoon or swear in front of the master. 

This show is a partnership between the Scottish National Galleries and The Tate, where it hung earlier this year. In Edinburgh it benefits from additional material from the galleries’ holdings of Penrose’s archive as well as a small section devoted to the Scottish painters Colquhoun and ­MacBryde. 

The exhibition that most haunts Picasso And Modern British Art is another from the Tate stable: Matisse Picasso from a decade ago. That was the spellbinding tale of two artists, radically different in interest and temperament, measuring themselves against each other’s achievements, suspicious, envious, circling each other in a mutual dance.

This show, and the excellent, thoroughly researched catalogue, makes utterly explicit that there were never such authoritative figures in Britain. Instead the artists it focuses on – Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicolson, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and David Hockney – are variously dazzled or daunted. Picasso had friendships with some of these artists, but they were never real peers or rivals.

Thus the big plot of the exhibition is the long slow curve by which the nation came to love Picasso, indeed made him synonymous with the word modern, and not just in art. Its subplots are the dizzying little chicanes that individual artists navigated in his slipstream.

The scene is set with some early works acquired by British private collectors – the lovely Child With A Dove from 1901, the waif-like Girl In A Chemise of 1905, who stands gloomily on the threshold between the artist’s Blue and Rose period. 

Many of those who first encountered Picasso were members of the Bloomsbury Group. There has been much art ­historical hand-wringing that it was this gang who got hold of him first. Clive and Vanessa Bell bought a small still life from 1907, Jars And Lemon, ­
in October 1911; concealed beneath its rhythmic structure are some studies for Les ­Demoiselles. 

Duncan Grant would first have seen important Picasso works in Gertrude Stein’s ­Paris apartment in 1909. He met Picasso in 1912. He knew the important 1913 painting, Head Of A Man, in which Picasso emulates, in paint, his radical experiments in assemblage and collage. 

Grant’s own works echo Picasso’s without ever seeming to understand them. While Picasso was dismantling our understanding of what a picture might be and recalibrating its relationship with the real world, Grant subsumed all of this back into pretty picture making and design. Head of A Man, now in New York, is an odd, abrasive little painting. Grant’s response within a year or two was to use its lessons in an anodyne textile design.

One of the great benefits of this show is the opportunity it provides to reappraise works and artists you are long acquainted with. Like old friends, you often don’t see your national collections for what they are. Suddenly windows are thrown open in familiar rooms and the outside world is let in. 

Wyndham Lewis’s satirical Tyro paintings seem even more like tiresome posturing when you consider them in context, but his small drawings and watercolours stand up well. Lewis was suspicious about what he saw as Picasso’s leisurely inertia and closed subject matter, but he was shouting too hard to listen.

Graham Sutherland is drowned in a pool of lachrymose sentiment. Francis Bacon seems noisy but dissembling, notoriously vague about both sources and process in his work, it’s easy to read Picasso as a source in his Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion. But Bacon’s angst can seem an affectation at times. Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson stand up in very different ways. 

Moore, in particular, makes you look more clearly at the evidence, that is everywhere in this show, that Picasso was a monochrome figure for much of the century in Britain. Drawings were easy to reproduce, paintings very difficult. Art books were tiny in format, uniformly black and white. 

You can understand why painters were dazzled when they first saw Picasso’s art in his studio or in private homes. But Moore responded to Picasso in black and white, to the labour that underpinned Picasso’s radicalism, to the big lessons about modelling and form. He found a way to repress his awe and soldier through.

Oddly, in the final section David Hockney comes out of this show rather well. Not because he could ever match Picasso, but because the cool distance he applies to his work is possibly the only way to deal with such a dominant personality. Hockney feminises the macho monster, invokes him as both past master and friendly ghost. He also suggests a brittleness and irony in Picasso’s plundering of art ­history. 

Invited to design a production of Erik Satie’s Parade, Hockney reverted to Picasso’s 1917 designs. The 1980 painting Harlequin, possibly intended as a poster for the production, sees a clown in Picasso-designed outfit cartwheeling through a stage set which is a post-modern set of allusions to the nature of illusion. As so often, Picasso is a trickster figure in British art, a figure of superhuman talents often hiding behind the curtain, always threatening to take centre stage.

And he still does, the strongest recommendation for this important show, is of course the opportunity to see countless important works by 
the man himself, not his ­imitators.

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Claude Monet Quotes

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Claude Monet (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist movement which had been called after his painting Impression, Sunrise; painted in 1872 or 1873. 

 

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Vincent van Gogh Quotes

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Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art.

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Pablo Picasso Quotes

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Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramicist, and stage designer.

 

Salvador Dali Quotes

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Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989) was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter.

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Leonardo da Vinci Quotes

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Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. 

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Palette 'owned' by artist John Opie bought by St Agnes museum

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The palette was discovered in an auction brochure by accident

A palette thought to belong to 18th Century artist John Opie, has been put on display at a Cornish museum.

Stewards from St Agnes museum say paint from the palette will be analysed to confirm its origins. 

It was discovered in an auction brochure by accident by a volunteer at the museum.

The palette was bought via telephone, bidding against competition in the auction in Gloucestershire.

John Opie was born at Trevellas, St Agnes near Truro. In 1782 he first exhibited at the Royal Academy.

He painted many distinguished men and women of his day. Opie died in April 1807, aged 46, and was buried at St Paul's Cathedral.

'Encrusted in paint'

The museum has confirmed the palette did belong to Edward Opie, great nephew of John.

Edward was the only one of his family to take up painting himself.

Museum officials believe John Opie's second wife, Amelia Alderson, was so impressed when Edward exhibited at the Royal Academy that she gave him the palette.

Liz Thompson, from the museum, said: "It is absolutely encrusted in paint. On the back are two dates. One is 1788, which would date to the time John Opie was painting.

"The other one which has Edward Opie's signature on it is 1839."

Mrs Thompson's husband discovered the palette while searching online for local items. The estimate for the historic item was £40, however it was finally sold to the museum, for £500.

The museum is hoping to clarify its link with John Opie in the Autumn.

Mrs Thompson said: "It's possible to date paint samples from tiny amounts. If we can show there was paint from John Opie's generation and some from Edward then we will have the link between the two."

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