And then turn up again ? It’s all very cloak and daggers, every so often you hear of these paintings/stories of lost artifacts.

What other paintings/things of interest have turned up ???

‘Leonardo da Vinci artwork’ sells for record $450m
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-42000696

No idea about the ‘missing’, but what an obscene amount of money. If I had that it wouldn’t go on an old painting of a hippy, no matter how rare it is.

Inheritance tax if you do that know you have it then it’s just a painting.

because the actual ones are so valuable they’re not on display, they’re locked in vaults, the ones you can see in galleries are copies. So when one get’s nicked / goes missing it can be ages before it’s noticed.

makes you think.

Cornelius Gurlitt, German recluse hid away Nazi Art hordes from ww2.. now on display.
Fascinating..

BBC linky..

Aside from those nicked during war most of them dont seem to be missing as such but instead attributed to someone else. They then get reevaluated and suddenly the value soars or possibly drops.

Odd one init – experts can’t say if it’s a Da Vinici or not, most agree it’s not a great example yet it sells for £400m or whatever.

I’m not sure ‘missing’ is the word, it’s more like owners don’t list all their worldly goods for all to see, I’ve got some old oil painting on the wall – haven’t a clue who painted it or when, could be worth a few quid, could be kindling, maybe it’s a missing masterpiece.

the ones you can see in galleries are copies.

Bollocks.
What happens is at some point in the paintings history, when it was nowhere near as valuable, it gets bought, then put away somewhere because nobody loves liked it very much and lost to view, only a note about it in reference to the artists works. Some artists painted hundreds of works in their lifetime, some, like Monet, deliberately wrecked paintings through dissatisfaction with the quality, and some got painted over.
Some got ‘restored’ and lost a lot of recognizable detail, so were thought to be copied or ‘in the style of’.
Over the course of four or five hundred years, lots of things go missing.

Wasn’t this one attributed to one of Leonardo’s followers and hung unrecognized for years – it sold for $60 in the 1950s and it’s only recently they’ve identified it as ‘genuine’? I expect that lots of precious artwork gets bought to launder funds / hide from the taxman and they get tucked away in vaults away from prying eyes and quietly forgotten about, gradually appreciating.

it’s only recently they’ve identified it as ‘genuine’

How on earth can they decide who painted a picture 400+ years ago?
I’ve never quite understood that!

Where are these vaults ??!?!?

If I had $400m spare I’m not sure I’d buy a painting where there was still some debate over the artist.

How does a rare painting go “missing”?

Theres been one or two world wars which can mix things up a bit. Over the decades and centuries artists work goes in and out of fashion too. We take it for granted that Da Vinci is ‘famous’ and that all his artworks would be too. But in the present day and for the last century he’s been famous really because one of his paintings became a celebrity.

The Mona Lisa was a pretty much un-remarkable, unknown work until it was stolen. However when it was stolen just over a century ago it was just at the moment that newspapers started including pictures with their stories. So the story of the Mona Lisa was accompanied by a picture of her. Looking back you’d think the most famous painting in the world had been stolen so of course that would be news. But if fact nobody really knew about it the painting – it was just one of hundreds and hundreds of paintings in the Louvre. It was the Louvre being targeted for the theft that made it newsworthy. The result though was it became the most famous painting in the world by being stolen. News coverage of the theft made it pretty much the first work of art that you know what it looked like before you saw it for real. That made the painting famous and since then its been famous for being famous. That in turn made Leonardo, a painter who finished very few paintings, famous as well. But for centuries prior to that he and his works were not really on the general public’s radar and it would be easy for works to change hands with out any documentation or fuss, or even just get forgotten about.

Of course the other thing that can happen is someone can send their Da Vinci by My Hermes.

You’ve also got to consider that there are many administrations and kleptocracies in this world who have been gently ‘redistributing’ their nation’s sovereign wealth into offshore bank accounts. Suddenly you’re sitting with a warehouse full of green-stuff that you can ‘legitimise’ by turning it into rare artwork that hangs on your wall and show to your kleptocrat mates. The sad fact is that there are financial institutes and auction houses in London to ‘legitimise’ this process on the basis of a fee.

The sad fact is that there are financial institutes and auction houses in London to ‘legitimise’ this process on the basis of a fee.

$50m fee in this case!

Of course the other thing that can happen is someone can send their Da Vinci by My Hermes.

To themselves?

One does tend to lose track of those which are kept in the store.

Salvadore Dali was giving away paintings to trades people as payment so potentially hundreds of works out there uncatalogued and lost in attic’s, cellars etc. These trades people just chucked these things in their lofts or cellars and forgot about them, as the house changed hands these paintings are discovered and come to light after everyone had forgotten about them. So I guess all manner of ways these things can get forgotten about – they’ve not always been valuable so people have not always cared particularly well for them.

Of course the other thing that can happen is someone can send their Da Vinci by My Hermes.
To themselves?

That won’t work though as it would never, ever turn up again

It apparently was part of King Charles I of England’s collection in the 1600s and got lost, but was “rediscovered” in 2005.

A lot of royal stuff went “missing” at that time. Either sold to fund the war, confiscated or just nicked. It would have just hung on somebody else’s wall for a while.

Leonardo da Vinci artwork sells for record $450m

I bet it would have sold for more if he’d have have been holding a joint in his fingers.

It apparently was part of King Charles I of England’s collection in the 1600s and got lost, but was “rediscovered” in 2005.

Surely the last known owner should get it back when i turns up?

How does something turn up again suddenly valuable and not get returned to the last known proper owner…

Does the crown have a claim to some of this money?

What happens is at some point in the paintings history, when it was nowhere near as valuable, it gets bought, then put away somewhere because nobody loves liked it very much and lost to view, only a note about it in reference to the artists works

For example Caravaggio’s Taking of The Christ. Painted around 1602, owned by the same family in Rome for around 200 years before being sold to a Scot. It was described at the time by the sellers as being by one of the followers of Caravaggio, not by Caravaggio himself. From around 1802 to around 1921 it hung in the buyer’s home in Fife until the death of his last descendant. It was then offered to the National Gallery in Edinburgh but refused as a copy and of no real interest so was then auctioned and bought by an Irish woman who a few years later donated it to a Jesuit group in Dublin. It was then hung as a nice painting with a religious theme until the 1990’s when it was spotted by a conservator from the Irish National Gallery. He called in more expert assistance who cleaned it up a bit and identified the style of the brushwork as very much Caravaggio, but of an unknown painting. They then gained access to the family archives of the original owners in Rome and found the first mention of what, at that point, had been an unknown painting by one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance. It’s now hanging in the National Gallery in Dublin and is unquestionably attributed to Caravaggio. So there you have a “lost” painting, only having had 4 owners, the third having no idea of it’s value.

I love this story – I use it as a training example of what the pitfalls are of insuring auction houses.

I mean they’re staking a huge amount on it being genuine.

Personally I don’t think it is – I agree that da Vinci would have included the light distortion. Interestingly a wood block carving made in the 1800’s (I think) to produce prints from did have the distortions and the thinking is there’s no way the carver would have included them off his own back. Their job was to copy what they saw and not embellish.

It apparently was part of King Charles I of England’s collection in the 1600s and got lost, but was “rediscovered” in 2005.
Surely the last known owner should get it back when i turns up?

‘Lost’ doesn’t necessarily mean left of the tube and festering in Lost Property. It can just mean lost from available records. King Charles would have had an archivist so there’ll be a verifiable record of him owning it when he owned it. If it was sold or given to someone who didn’t keep and publish records then the work didn’t disappear but it would be ‘lost’ in the sense that archivists and art historians wouldn’t know where it was after that point and of course in the the intervening centuries it could change hands several times between people who don’t keep or publish records of their possessions.

How on earth can they decide who painted a picture 400+ years ago?
I’ve never quite understood that!

You should watch the tv series that seeks to confirm the veracity of paintings for the owners, where there is a dispute along with historical references about the painting in question, the forensic work that goes into checking chemical composition of pigments being particularly interesting, because there are pigments that cannot possibly exist before certain dates that are well-known to conservators and art historians, certain blue pigments, titanium white, the slightest trace immediately flags up fake, unless the pigments can be directly connected to later poor restoration, then there’s the wood panel or canvas that the painting is based on, x-ray, infra-red and UV-photography can reveal hidden paintings, re-modelling during the actual creative process, and other hidden details that can confirm the age of a painting, plus there’s the way artists paint, the way brush-strokes always lie, type of brushes used, even tiny items caught in wet paint, like an insect recently discovered embedded in the paint of a work by van Gough, IIRC.
It’s fascinating stuff, and can even involve taking flakes of paint and looking at them via scanning electron microscope to see if there are multiple layers of paint, and the composition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_or_Fortune%3F

Salvadore Dali was giving away paintings to trades people as payment s

Not the best story about Dali 😈

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1185778/Jade-water-buffalo-left-bank-vault-70-years-fetches-record-4m-auction.html

My next door neighbour, nice little windfall though she wasn’t short of cash. Not so much a lost item, as the market changing, and stuff that was just very nice to have being worth a fortune. RIP Diana, wonderful old girl, was thinking about her today, she lived many years in Zimbabwe.

Sorry for the Mail link, but it’s the best link I can find right now.

$450m

no accounting for taste i reckon, shanner of a picture! 😆

I reckon they should pay more say £1 billion or something.

In fact there should be a rule that all the billionaires in the world should have at least have one £1 billion painting in their possession.

They should all spend their money to show off after all what’s the use of if they cannot spend them in after life. The more they spend the better it is for others.

All the paintings in this world worth jack all to me … 😆

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-16/is-the-450-million-salvator-mundi-leonardo-da-vinci-painting-a-fake?cmpId=flipboard

All the paintings in this world worth jack all to me …

Yeah, well, that comes as no surprise. 🙄

A ‘rare’ painting; as opposed to what?

No idea about the ‘missing’, but what an obscene amount of money.If I had that it wouldn’t go on an old painting of a hippy, no matter how rare it is.

That’s an interesting thought because what you are saying is that if you had a choice between owning an old painting (by Leonardo) or owning something else (presumably an RS4 for making progress, and a lot of other things) then owning the painting would be obscene, but owning the other things wouldn’t?

That’s interesting thought because you’re assuming a lot about what I’m saying from me thinking $400million is an obscene amount of money to spend on a painting, which, whoever it’s by, is actually a bit shit.
Pretty much completely wrong, btw.

A ‘rare’ painting; as opposed to what?

I suppose rare in the sense that the artist finished very few paintings. Compared to someone like JoLoMo who reckons he knocks out 3000 paintings a year (in almost the same breath as complaining than non of them end up in national collections)

That’s interesting thought because you’re assuming a lot about what I’m saying from me thinking $400million is an obscene amount of money to spend on a painting, which, whoever it’s by, is actually a bit shit.

Let’s assume that you have the choice between owning a painting by whoever, and owning something else. We’ll assume that you have the wherewithall to make this choice (i.e. all that money in this case). Now, why is it obscene to choose the painting over whatever else you could buy for all that money? Why would it be less obscene to buy, let’s say, a street of houses in a posh part of London? Better value, to me, sure. But where is the obscenity? The money hasn’t been destroyed, it’s simply moved to somebody else who can then choose whether to use it to solve world hunger, buy that street of houses, or even buy the painting back (they might have to move quick as the price is unlikely to have fallen in the interim). Where’s the obscenity?

Eh?

I haven’t read the whole thread so apologies if this has already been mentioned but I read this a few months ago (possibly linked from here previously) and I found it fascinating

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/27/wasnt-cock-a-hoop-fooled-experts-britains-master-art-forger

Fascinating stuff, MTB-Idle. Cheers.