FEATURE EXHIBITIONS
New participant Stuart Lochhead Sculpture has joined forces with Georg Laue, Kunstkammer Ltd. (London) to show an exhibition dedicated to The Studiolo: From Renaissance to Modern. The studiolo was a private space for the scholar and collec- tor to handle treasures, read books, study scientific instruments and contemplate the humanist world, and where collectors could share their knowledge and exchange ideas with fellow connoisseurs. This joint exhibition blends the old with the new in the way the Renaissance collector would have done, and shares the intimacy and private world of the studiolo with a wider audience. Highlights include an unique masterpiece of German bronze casting, in the form of an octagonal mortar with griffin head handles of c.1547, described as the chef d’oeuvre of Albert Hachman, the celebrated bronze founder from Cleves, and a rare sculpture by Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), cast in plaster after a wax model made by the artist in preparation for the Raft of the Medusa of 1819, in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Art and the Domestic Space is an exhibition by Trinity Fine Art which aims to recreate a domestic space of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and featuring objects commissioned by families for their villas and palaces. One of the most important functions of art in a home was to exalt the standing of the family who lived there. Highlights include three portraits of a dy- nastic nature: two marble busts by Alessandro Rondoni (c.1644-1710) and a painting by Mario Balassi (1604-1687) from the collection of the noble Florentine Corsi family.

Stephen Ongpin Fine Art is celebrating nature and going back to the roots of drawing and inspiration in Drawn to Nature: Flora and Fauna from the 16th Century to the Present. Selecting natural history subjects from across 450 years, the exhibition, available to be viewed online and in their St James’s gallery in London, will consist of around 40 drawings and watercolours of natural history subjects priced between £1,000 and £150,000. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated digital catalogue, and includes the work of several living artists.

New participant Panter & Hall presents The Lost Drawings of Steven Spurrier. Steven Spurrier (1878-1961) was an artist, au- thor, poster designer and one of the most successful illustrators of his time, for over 50 years a regular contributor to the Illus- trated London News, The Sketch, The Radio Times as well as many other British, American and German publications. He was the first illustrator of Arthur Ransome’s classic book Swallows and Amazons. A collection of his paintings and drawings had lain forgotten in an old barn, and were only found by his family when the property came to be sold.

Osborne Samuel Ltd, the Modern British specialists taking part in their first London Art Week, will have two features for this Summer’s LAW DIGITAL presentation: rare prints by Paul Nash & C. R. Wynne Nevinson and their circle with a full digital cat- alogue and short film, and a Modern British Art exhibition focusing on major post war British sculptors and painters, including unseen works from the estate of John Craxton, important paintings and works on paper by Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Ben Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens, Victor Pasmore, Graham Sutherland, Keith Vaughan and Christopher Wood, in addition to the influential sculpture of Lynn Chadwick, Henry Moore and William Turnbull.

Sladmore Gallery returns to London Art Week; their chosen subject, inspired by current circumstances, will show a number of important sculptures which normally remain unseen in their collections but which have been leant by the gallery to inter- national museum exhibitions. Among major works is a group of reductions of The Burghers of Calais, reworked by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) after the completion of the life-sized figures, and made for him by Lebossé between 1895 and 1903; only six groups of these reductions are known, two of which are in museums. The present group is currently in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt for the largest and most complete exhibition on Impressionist sculpture, with works from major museums on loan from across the world. The museum has just reopened and the exhibition has now been extended until the end of October.

Tomasso Brothers Fine Art is following a related thread, and presenting The Sculpture Museum: works after sculptures that are in museums around the world, bringing a piece of the museum to the viewer, given it is impossible to travel there in person right now. Highlights include a 17th century finely carved porphyry portrait of Emperor Trajan (governed 98 AD to 117 AD), celebrated by the Senate as Optimus Princeps, “the best ruler”. Carved in Rome, this head is closely related to a 2nd century AD white marble portrait of Trajan, now in the Louvre Museum, Paris and formerly in the renowned antiquities collection of the Albani family in Rome. The same collection held a second version of this composition, now in the Musei Capitolini, Rome.

HIGHLIGHTS – PAINTINGS & WORKS ON PAPER
Among individual highlights this year is a newly-discovered work by Cesare Franchi, known as Pollino (1560-1598) in pen, pencil and gouache on a gilded background – a beautiful depiction of the Crowning of the Virgin surrounded by a Female Saint, Angels playing music and Children dancing, c. 1590 – which Belgian dealer Klaas Muller will exhibit. In contrast, new exhibitor Galerie Canesso is showing Caravaggism and Tenebrism in Seventeenth Century Italy where among highlights are two masterful examples of chiaroscuro: in a work by Pietro Ricchi (1606-1675) depicting an intense game of coins called morra between two men; and another of Salome with the head of John the Baptist, by Francesco Rustici, called ‘Il Rustichino’ (1592-1626).