#museum-acquisition

#museum-acquisition

A pair of 19th century lacquered bronze and wrought iron andirons designed by architect Edward William Godwin and manufactured by Hart, Son, Peard & Co. have been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. This is the first time metalwork designed by Godwin has been bought by a museum. The dealer, Paul Shutler of Broadway, Worcestershire, UK, bought them from an antiques center in Connecticut last June. Before being placed on sale there they were in a private collection in the US.

But these holdings also encompass German modernist photography by August Sander and Karl Blossfeldt; typologies by Bernd and Hilla Becher and works by their students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; post-Tiananmen Square Chinese conceptual and video art of the late 20th century; extended series by contemporary Japanese photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama, and Kohei Yoshiyuki; and examples of vernacular photography, including commercial, forensic, and ethnographic images, from the 1800s to the present.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a masterpiece of Hellenistic jewelry: an elaborate gold ring with a miniature gold and enamel garden scene in a box-shaped bezel under a domed rock crystal cover. Created around 150 B.C., the ring is in impeccable condition, and one of the finest surviving examples of late Hellenistic box bezel rings. The bezel is oval and outlined around the crystal cabochon with beads of gold granulation.