LONDON.- This year’s edition of London Art Week, the most important gallery-based celebration of traditional art, drew to a successful close on Friday 10 July reporting significant visitors, a large number of new clients, and an impressive array of sales and reserves to international museums and private collectors.

Highlighting the unrivalled quality, riches and expertise available within the galleries of Mayfair and St. James’s, London Art Week 2015 brought together over 40 leading art galleries and three auction houses. This year included more dedicated exhibitions than ever before, and presented a wealth of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and works of art from antiquity to the 20th century, many of which had been hidden from public view for decades.

Johnny van Haeften and Lowell Libson, Senior Committee members of London Art Week: “This year London Art Week reinforced its position as a key moment of the year for collectors and curators. Held in the galleries of St. James’s and Mayfair, the leading destination for traditional art and expertise, London Art Week creates a unique atmosphere and has fostered ever-stronger relationships between experts, curators, collectors and enthusiasts. It is significant that a number of museum acquisitions and reserves have already taken place and we are seeing new clients entering this internationally established collecting arena.”

Visitors to the event included collectors from as far afield as Australia, Brazil, China, India and Singapore, and important curators from over 45 museums included representatives from the National Gallery, London; the British Museum; the National Gallery of Ireland; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the National Gallery of Prague; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Art Institute of Chicago.

An impressive number of sales to museums were recorded during the week, and many reserves have been put in place. Daniel Katz Gallery sold Silence, a plaster by Auguste Préault (1809-1879), to an American Museum and Femme vase immerge dans l’eau, circa 1900, a watercolour by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) to a European Museum.

At Stephen Ongpin Fine Art a major American museum acquired the landscape watercolour of Lynmouth, Devon by Sir Edward John Poynter, P.R.A. (1836-1919), while two works from their exhibition ‘Italian Drawings 1500-1920’ were also acquired by public institutions. At Tomasso Brothers an American museum acquired The Medici Lion, a bronze by Pietro Simoni da Barga (active circa 1571 – 1589) thought to have been made for Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, later Ferdinando I, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

A number of galleries made significant sales to new clients, including Trinity Fine Art, in association with Carlo Orsi and Walter Padovani, with A Regatta on the Grand Canal by Michele Marieschi (1710-1744). Another work by the artist, Santa Maria della Salute, sold to a new client through Charles Beddington Ltd. who hosted an exhibition at The Fine Art Society titled Venice: Paintings and Drawings of Three Centuries. The Weiss Gallery sold Lady Mary Feilding as Countess of Aran by the famed Jacobean artist Daniel Mytens (circa 1590-1647) (illustrated left), also to a new client, and secured several reserves. Maurizio Nobile was exhibiting for the first time at London Art Week and sold four works to four new clients, including a rediscovered Madonna and Child by Simon Vouet (1590-1649). Elsewhere, Sam Fogg recorded a number of significant sales from their exhibition ‘Reclaiming Antiquity; creation and revival between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance, while Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch sold 34 of 56 works on offer at their exhibition ‘Fragments: From the Tiber to the Ganges’ including an Egyptian, wood standing male figure from circa 342-332 B.C.