The UK authorities has positioned an export bar on a portray by the Rococo pioneer Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) that when hung in No.10 Downing Avenue—marking the second time in current days that the primisterial residence’s work have made headlines. The early 18th-century work, entitled Le Rêve de L’Artiste, has been valued at £6,075,000 (plus £215,020 VAT).
The export bar, which permits time for a UK gallery or establishment to accumulate the portray, will expire on 29 November. In any other case the work is “prone to leaving the UK until a home purchaser could be discovered to put it aside for the nation”, says an announcement from the UK authorities’s Division for Tradition, Media and Sport (DCMS).
The portray was purchased in 1736 by the primary Prime Minister of Nice Britain, Robert Walpole, and was displayed in Girl Walpole’s dressing room in Downing Avenue for the remaining years of his administration, in response to a DCMS assertion.
The work options in A Catalogue of the Proper Honourable Sir Robert Walpole’s Assortment of Photos, the place it’s described as: “‘Watteau—A dream of Watteau’s, Himself asleep by a rock; A number of Dancers & Grotesque figures within the Clouds’.”
The portray was bought at Sotheby’s New York in 1959 for £1,200 on behalf of the gallery Wildenstein & Co. and was bought once more in 1963 through the seller Dudley Tooth of the London-based gallery, Arthur Tooth & Sons. It has been in a non-public assortment since 1993.
“[The painting] offers us an enchanting perception not solely into Watteau’s considering as a painter however into wider 18th-century ideas of inspiration and creativeness,” says Mark Hallett, a member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Artwork and Objects of Cultural Curiosity and a former director of the Courtauld Institute of Artwork in London.
“As such, Le Rêve de l’Artiste has a particular, virtually distinctive standing within the artist’s output. This can be a work that cries out for additional analysis, interpretation and appreciation, and that totally deserves being retained for the nation.”
The Wallace Assortment in London owns eight works by Watteau together with Voulez-vous triompher des belles? (round 1714–17). The gathering’s web site says that Watteau is “finest remembered because the painter of a type of portray that we now know because the fête galante. We have a tendency to explain his compositions as dreamlike depictions of beautifully-dressed aristocrats at play in lush parkland settings.”
