Ten new works of art have been added to the ARC museum:

1 new piece by Louis Apol
1 new piece by Bernardus Johannes Blommers
1 new piece by Jan Bogaerts
1 new piece by George Hendrik Breitner
1 new piece by Otto Eerelman
1 new piece by Frans Josef Luckx
1 new piece by Anton Mauve
1 new piece by Albert Roelofs
2 new pieces by Willem Roelofs

Hello,

I just got done visiting your site for the first time and all I can say is WOW! It is so refreshing to find an organization that actually understands what art really is (and is not!).

I was just wondering how your organization started? I read Fred Ross's writings and I am very impressed with his ideas especially chapter 2 Good Art/Bad Art especailly when he is talking about the brain washing of our children, so true! I was wondering where he studied? And if Mr. Ross is planning on writing any books as I would be very much interested in reading more.

Thank you for your time and keep up the great work!

Katie

Eleven new works of art have been added to the ARC museum:

1 new piece by Adrianus Eversen
1 new piece by Abraham Hulk Snr
1 new piece by Herman Frederik Carel ten Kate
1 new piece by Barend Cornelis Koekkoek
1 new piece by Charles Henri Joseph Leickert
1 new piece by Alberto Pasini
1 new piece by Henriette Ronner-Knip
1 new piece by Andreas Schelfhout
1 new piece by Cornelis Springer
1 new piece by Petrus Van Schendel
1 new piece by Wouter Verschuur

Eleven new works of art have been added to the ARC museum:

2 new pieces by Bernard de Hoog
1 new piece by Otto Eerelman
1 new piece by Adrianus Eversen
1 new piece by Frederick Hendrik Kaemmerer
1 new piece by Jacob Henricus Maris
1 new piece by Gustave Mascart
1 new piece by Lionel Noel Royer
1 new piece by Philippe Lodowyck Jacob Sadee

Eight new works of art have been added to the ARC museum:

1 new piece by Charles Green
3 new pieces by Sir Hubert von Herkomer
1 new piece by William Henry Hunt
1 new piece by John Henry Johnstone
1 new piece by John Arthur Lomax
1 new piece by Constance Phillott

Nine new works of art have been added to the ARC museum:

1 new piece by Ernest Albert Chadwick
1 new piece by George Gordon Fraser
2 new pieces by William Fraser Garden
2 new pieces by Albert Goodwin
1 new piece by Alfred William Hunt
1 new piece by Edward Killingworth Johnson
1 new piece by Vincent Balfour-Browne

Ten new works of art have been added to the ARC museum:

1 piece by George Clark Stanton
1 piece by Henry Ryland
3 pieces by Noel Laura Nisbet
1 piece by George Marks
1 piece by Carlton Alfred Grant
2 pieces by Norman Ault
1 piece by Helen Mary Elizabeth Allingham

Nine new works of art have been added to the ARC Museum:

5 pieces by Richard Doyle
4 pieces by John Byam Liston Shaw

It is with a very heavy heart that I report that Christopher Wood is gone. Christopher Wood and more recently his wife Rosie have been among my family’s dearest friends for the past two decades. A true innovator and pioneer in art history, Christopher was one of perhaps three or four people most responsible for the re-appreciation of the entire Victorian era’s fine art. Today we freely recognize the giants of that time, like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, J.W. Waterhouse, Frederick, Lord Leighton, Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Sir John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Frank Dicksee, Edmund Blair Leighton, William Powell Frith , and Edward John Poynter, etc., as among the greatest painters that mankind has ever produced. But when Christopher was first touting them to his colleagues and friends in the 1960’s, they and their artwork were in disgrace, displayed almost nowhere in the entire UK, but a basement room in the Tate Museum which hung but 11 or 12 works that are among the hundreds of masterpieces that now occupy no less than 8 major galleries on the main floor today. As recently as 1978 that basement room was still the only venue which I remember visiting with my family just one year after starting to collect myself after discovering Bouguereau in 1977.

Christopher was only 4 years older than I, but he had beaten me by a decade in his knowledge of this era. I didn’t meet him until the late 80’s, but we became fast friends and I would never visit a London presale exhibit again without learning his thoughts about what hidden treasures might be on the block this time around.

Once while showing him our collection on one of his visits to New York, I excused myself to take an important call. Before I returned, I heard streaming from our living room some of the finest jazz piano playing I’ve ever heard. I thought Thelonius Monk had suddenly materialized in my home. Without a hint of shyness he joyously treated us to at least 40 minutes of nonstop improvisation as we would call out one favorite song after another which he would instantly transform into numerous creative renderings. His handling of “Honey Suckle Rose” and "Aint Misbehavin” were among his most memorable. And this from one of the world’s top scholars of Victorian and Edwardian Art. If only I had realized last July when we dined together at one of his favorite haunts near New Bond Street,… perhaps I would have… could have… should have made certain to tell him how much he meant to us all.

(Reprinted from The London Daily Telegraph)

Dealer who helped make Victorian art fashionable again and appeared on The Antiques Roadshow

Christopher Wood with Portrait of Joan Clarkson 'The English Rose'
Photo: TONY PRIME


Christopher Wood, who died on January 6 aged 67, was an art dealer at the forefront of the revival of interest in Victorian art in the late 20th century.

Wood specialised in Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian paintings, watercolours and drawings, as well as in the Arts and Crafts movement and Gothic revival furniture, sculpture and ceramics. Scholarly and commercial interest in these areas had all but disappeared after the First World War, and it was not until the late 1960s that the Victorian era began to be reassessed.

Leading the way were dealers such as Godfrey Pilkington, Jeremy Maas, Julian Hartnoll – and Christopher Wood, who in 1968, while working at Christie's picture department, began to hold specialised Victorian sales. "Pugin and William Morris," he said much later in life, "are my twin gods."

Christopher Edward Russell Wood, the eldest of three boys, was born on October 31 1941 in Newcastle upon Tyne, where his father ran the family business, the wet fish sellers Alexander & Wood.

As a young boy he showed an embryonic interest in collecting, although his initial choice was stamps. The passion for the 19th century perhaps derived from his visits to his paternal grandmother, who lived in a large, excessively gloomy Victorian house filled with antimacassars and grandfather clocks.

At Sedbergh he played cricket for the 1st XI, then went on to St John's College, Cambridge, where he read Fine Arts and played piano in the Cambridge University Jazz Band – the drummer was Jamie Dugdale, now the 2nd Lord Crathorne. Throughout his life Wood continued to delight friends and colleagues with his piano-playing, and he retained a particular affection for the music of Fats Waller.

After university he went straight to Christie's, of which he was appointed a director aged only 27. In 1977 he left the auction house to found the Christopher Wood Gallery in Motcomb Street, Belgravia. In the mid-1980s he was bought out by Mallett of Bond Street, the antiques business, which wanted a picture-dealing wing.

Soon after his arrival there he bought at auction Going North and Coming South, the spectacular pair of paintings produced in the 1890s by George Earl; they were subsequently sold to the National Railway Museum in York. Wood was a director of Mallett until 1995, when he left to work as a dealer and consultant based in St James's.

He acted as a consultant to both private collectors and museums on all aspects of the art market, including auctions, historical research, restoration and framing, export licences, shipping and insurance.

From 1999 to 2004 Wood was one of the connoisseurs of pictures who brought their expertise to the popular BBC television programme Antiques Roadshow. If he sometimes found it hard to let a hopeful member of the public down gently, he could show great enthusiasm when a picture took his interest. In 1990 he wrote and presented a television series for Channel 4, Painters to the People.

Wood was also a prolific author in his field. He produced, with Christopher Newall, the two-volume Dictionary of Victorian Painters, first published in 1971.

His other publications included Victorian Panorama: paintings of Victorian life (1976); The Pre-Raphaelites (1981); Olympian Dreamers (1983); Tissot (1986); Painted Gardens: English watercolours 1850–1914 (with Penelope Hobhouse, 1988); Paradise Lost: paintings of English country life and landscape 1850–1914 (1988); Victorian Painting in Oils and Watercolours (1996); The Great Art Boom 1970–1997 (1997); Burne-Jones (1998); Victorian Painting (1999); Fairies in Victorian Art (2000); and William Powell Frith, RA: painter of modern life (2006).

Wood's natural diffidence could sometimes be misread as remoteness or even arrogance; but in truth he had a sweet nature, and – in a world that can attract rogues and chancers – he was utterly honest and reliable in his business affairs. In later life he came to radiate a new air of contentment; tall, good-looking and charming, he was an easy-going, friendly man who enjoyed his membership of Brooks's, the Beefsteak and the Chelsea Arts Club.

Essentially Wood was an aesthete. His Gothic house in Somerset – a former primary school built in 1857 which he bought at auction in the early 1980s and painstakingly restored – was filled with Victorian artefacts, and he constructed a belfry especially for the bats (which, however, ignored it in favour of the eaves over the front door).

When he heard that some of the locals had referred to this weekend retreat as "the Addams Family house" he joined in the joke by purchasing a mechanical severed hand made of plastic.

On one of the walls he hung a framed quotation from Art Journal in 1867: "I can scarcely imagine a task more agreeable for a gentleman of means, taste and leisure than to set himself to the consistent decoration and furnishing of a Gothic villa."

Christopher Wood married first, in 1967, Sarah Drummond, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. He married secondly, in 2004, Rosie Townsend.

Christopher Wood was also the guest on an Art Renewal Center podcast available at http://audio.artrenewal.org/