Our Sales to Museums

Selling to museums around the world is an important part of our business.  Almost all our items are sourced from old colonial collections in the UK, so our items have the type of provenance that museums need.

Quite often we place items in museums in the items’ originating countries, thereby ‘returning’ them to their regions of origin.

This is enabled by our research our subsequent correct identification of objects that hitherto have been mis-identified and ‘lost’.

We have sold hundreds of objects to 40 public museums in the US, Asia & Europe.

Museums and Institutions to which we have sold include:

  • Los Angeles County Museum of Art, USA
  • Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, USA
  • The Art Institute of Chicago, USA
  • Minneapolis Institute of Arts, USA
  • Peabody Essex Museum, USA
  • Peabody Museum, Harvard University, USA
  • Baltimore Museum of Art, USA
  • Cincinnati Art Museum, USA
  • Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, USA
  • Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, USA
  • Detroit Institute of Arts, USA
  • Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, France
  • Musée de la Compagnie des Indes-Ville de Lorient, France
  • British Museum, London, UK
  • The British Library, UK
  • Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
  • Horniman Museum, London, UK
  • Royal Ontario Museum, Canada
  • National Gallery Singapore
  • Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore
  • Peranakan Museum, Singapore
  • Indian Heritage Centre, Singapore
  • Malay Heritage Centre, Singapore
  • Baba House, Singapore
  • Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia
  • King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, Saudi Arabia
  • Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum – Cultures of the World, Germany
  • The International Foundation of Indonesian Culture & Asian Heritage, Germany
  • National Gallery of Australia
  • Art Gallery of South Australia
  • Art Gallery of Queensland, Australia
  • National Gallery of Victoria, Australia
  • Art Gallery of Western Australia
  • Sadberk Hanim Museum, Istanbul, Turkey
  • Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Reunion, France
  • Museum Volkenkunde (Tropenmuseum), The Netherlands
  • Rietburg Museum, Zurich, Switzerland
  • Johann Jacobs Museum, Zurich, Switzerland
  • The David Collection, Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Museo Oriental, Spain
  • Schell Collection Museum, Austria
  • Museum on the Mound, Edinburgh, Scotland

Professional gallerists or dealers play an important role in the preservation of world cultural history, particularly when it comes to discovering and researching items that hitherto had been lost or mis-classified. The London Chinese art dealer Giuseppe Eskanazi recalls in his biography a speech given by Sherman Lee, the well-known director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, to celebrate the Museum’s 50th Anniversary in 1966:

“The most memorable part was Sherman Lee’s speech after dinner, when he thanked the various dealers who had helped the museum acquire so many important objects. His closing words were, ‘When a curator comes back from a trip and says, ‘Look what I have found!’ I say to him, ‘Remember, a dealer found it before you.’ “

– from Eskanazi, G., & H. Elias, A Dealer’s Hand: The Chinese Art World through the Eyes of Giuseppe Eskanazi, Scala, 2012, p. 58.