ART TREASURES

Waikato Times, Volume 92, Issue 14257, 7 January 1920, Page 6

ART TREASURES

WAR POVERTY FORCES SALE. A European "treasure hunt" by Karl Freund wag to result in an auction sale in New York recently. The hunt (reports the New York Evening Post) seems to have carried him from Scotland to tho shores of the Mediterranean —over the Pyrenees into Spain and back again. Likewise has it delved into several centuries, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth. Prom Spain came one of the few paintings ever shown in this country by Antonios Camiccro, the imaginative and original, though not so widely known, contemporary of Goya. Broadly painted, with delicate humour, this painting of an impromptu dancing party has many of the attributes of the dynamic Goya, although in no sense a servile copy. Carnicero's "Balloon Ascension" is in the Prado. This picture was obtained from the collection of Major George Gardner House, London ■ —a regular "game preserve," by the way, that yielded up works by Hopner, Angelica Kauffmann, Cosway, Bonington, Wilson, Kneller, Mabuse, Canetto, and two rare juvenile portraits by Nicholas Maes. The Maes portraits have as great an appeal as any works in the sale, and yet there is a Sir Peter Lely portrait of a beautiful slender duchess! And there is a water-colour drawing by Gainsborough from the estate of Lady Alfred Paget, where evidently there was fine hunting. The tragic sales of Europe's treasures forced by war poverty has turned the hunters into parks which were kept inviolate for generations.