Truckin’

For New Zealand’s size there have been some pretty substantial philanthropic contributions made to contemporary art. Some obvious starters: Charles Brasch, Jenny Gibbs, Alan Gibbs, Robin and Erika Congreve, Denis and Verna Adam, James Wallace and, top of mind today, Fiona Campbell. Later today A+O will auction most of the works Campbell and her team toured to schools over the last ten years. 

Who’d have thought that Trade Me would have ended up sending contemporary art to school kids around the country. Thanks to a windfall from the sale of the online market place, and after asking herself ‘what the hell am I going to do with all this wealth?',  Fiona Campbell decided to deck out two trucks, fill them with contemporary NZ art and drive them round the country.

It wasn’t cheap. The total enterprise cost around $7.2 million. That represents an investment of $33 a head for each of the 216,611 students who got to look inside the trucks on the 708 school journey. The art was a mixed bag. Campbell has had two constant advisors - artist Rob McLeod, ‘who pretty much hates everything’, and curator Gerald Barnett, ‘who pretty much loves everything’. Presumably Fiona Campbell herself worked with these two extremes to assemble the collection.

Apparently the work the kids loved most was Andrew McLeod’s A Cautious Paralysis and this is one that has been held back from auction. Perhaps it was a favourite of Fiona Campbell's too along with a few other works not for sale including Fiona Pardington’s Solitary Female Huia and Michael Illingworth’s Girl In The Blue Hat (After Matisse).

Sources: A+O catalogue, rnz interview (Kim Hill and Fiona Campbell) 2011

The man who bought the world

As we saw in microcosm in NZ with the Paris, Sang and Francis auctions, nothing attracts art collectors more than the flickering glow of a single collector sale. In part it’s the solid line of ownership and stamp of good taste, but it’s also very much the allure of an appealing story to go along with the work. The creation of those stories has now become a central part of the auction business. 

If you want to see the phenomenon at its peak, check out Sotheby’s gearing up to flog the David Bowie collection in early November. Bowie was no slouch in the art collecting game but you’d have to describe what he assembled as extremely personal. There are some big names and they’ll no doubt fetch the big prices but many of the works are moody and introspective which is not the usual look for auction stars. But Bowie as a personality trailing his fame and associations and emotion - what a gift! 

To promote Bowie the Collector Sotheby’s have gone overboard: moody trailers, evocative quotes from the man, slideshows of his art collector life, reminiscences from his personal art curator Beth Greenacre, lots of ‘icons’ and ‘revereds’ and ‘passions’ thrown around, and so on and so on. You can access the full catalogue here

Images: top left, curator Beth Greenacre and right, Marcel Duchamp’s A Bruit Secret estimate to sell for $311,000–432,000. Bottom, Bowie’s collection ready for sale.

No show

OK, so it wasn’t the most original idea in the world, but Te Papa always said it was going to tell us our stories, the stories of Our Place. It then went on to spend many millions of dollars in purchasing items that would help that story telling. Most recently there’s the $1.5 million it paid for View of Mt Egmont, Taranaki, New Zealand, taken from New Plymouth, with Maoris driving off settlers’ cattle painted in 1861 by William Strutt.  All this means that when Toss Woollaston’s painting Poet by the sea (1959) came to market in the Tim and Sherrah Francis auction, it seemed a natural fit for Te Papa.

The Poet by the sea is a knotted array of cultural aspirations. Its subject is Charles Brasch, acknowledged as the cultural big cheese of the 1950s (poet, friend, editor, collector, high-minded fan). The painter is Woollaston who at this time carried the burden of finding the soul of NZ. The collectors were Tim and Sherrah Francis who were committed to the importance of a distinctively NZ culture and history. And to cap it off, Peter Simpson’s recent book Bloomsbury South describes the story in detail (with photographs). It’s a heavy-duty painting showing real cultural dynamics at play. It could hardly be more central to the National Collection and the story of NZ art.

But as we all know, Te Papa didn’t even make an appearance at the auction and made not a single purchase. Te Papa didn’t lose out to some deep-pocketed Auckland art fanatic at the auction either; it simply decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. Something’s afoot, especially when you remember that Te Papa spent $700,000 at the Paris Family auction in 2012 and hasn’t been shy to spend big bucks. Let’s recall:

Colin McCahon, A painting for Uncle Frank, 1980, purchased in 2000 for $2 million
Colin McCahon, Walk (series C), 1973, purchased in 2004 for $2.75 million
John Webber, Poetua, 1785, purchased in 2010 for $1.97 million
Michael Parekowhai, He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: story of a New Zealand river, 2011, purchased in 2012 for $1.3 million

In the very active Te Papa rumor mill it’s claimed that the institution’s collecting policy for art is shifting. Buying back to fill out the collection is out. Buying forward to prioritise the contemporary is in.  Can this be true? The last four curatorial hires all specialise in earlier work. Smart move Te Papa. Crazy times ahead.

All this would certainly help to explain why Te Papa wasn’t at the Francis auction to pick up high quality works by both neglected and well-known artists. Our top ten of these would be:

Philip Trusstum Pale blue square $9,000
Douglas MacDairmid Portrait of Akbar Tyabi $6,250
M T Woollaston Poet by the sea (A Portrait of Charles Brasch) $80,000
Richard Killeen Rot $9,500
Ross Ritchie After Ingres $10,600
Adele Younghusband Still life with candle and vase of flowers $9,250
Charles Tole A map of the Auckland province $5,600
H Linley Richardson Self portrait $2,500
Robert Ellis City $4,000
Dennis Knight-Turner Untitled $9,000

Image: Poet by the sea (a portrait of Charles Brasch) in the Te Papa storage racks (#notgoingtohappen)

To be perfectly Francis

If your faith in contemporary New Zealand art was wavering, last night would have settled your nerves. The Tim and Sherrah Francis collection on sale at Art + Object in Auckland never looked to be anything other than a benchmark for the marriage of serious money with serious art. The first signs were when two Andrew McLeod paintings sold for $36,000 each, and that's the hammer price without commissions. By lot number 48 of the first night's 122 lots, over half a million had gone under the hammer and eight lots later the tally was at $1.5 million. By the end of the evening around (#notthatgoodatadding) $5.5 million dollars worth of art had been knocked down.The big ticket item of the evening was Colin McCahon's eight part painting The Canoe Tainui which sold to a Hamilton collector for $1.35 million making McCahon the top artist at auction (#sorryaboutthatgoldie). Among the big prices were a 1956 koru drawing by Gordon Walters for $66,000, Shane Cotton's He Pukapuka Tuatahi for $252,000 and and Rita Angus's Tree Cutting Hawkes Bay at $255,000. And these prices will all be boosted by commissions. Overall seven paintings sold for over $200,000 and 12 over $100,000.

True to form, Te Papa didn't even bother to show up. This meant of course that it missed out on the opportunity to buy many significant works including Tosswill Woollason's The Poet which obviously belongs in the national collections. Still, the Auckland Art Gallery was there showing that it at least is still an art museum serious about its collections.

The block

The most recent catalogue from Art + Object is now online. It’s a two-day auction of the Tim and Sherrah Francis collection. A+O have had some good times with private collection sales, most particularly with Les and Milly Paris in 2012 and then with Ron Sang last year. It was obvious to anyone at those events that people are happy to pay something extra for the stories and status that often accompany such works as part of their provenance.

Single vendor auctions have always been prized by sellers and buyers alike. With contemporary art they probably had their highly charged beginnings in New York City with the sale of 50 works from the Robert C Scull collection in 1973. In that case, the high prices paid also sparked the infamous scuffle between vendor Scull and artist Robert Rauschenberg that you can see here (39 seconds in).

Since then there have been a number of great single vendor sales including the auction of 58 works from the Ganz collection in November 1997 described as, 'a steroid injection to the market' that netted a record breaking $US207 million. As it happens the Francises lived above Victor and Sally Gantz's apartment when Tim was posted to New York. Both Tim and Sherrah often spoke of the incredible experience of sitting with the Picassos and Matisses that hung on the living room walls and going downstairs to the basement to look at more contemporary works by Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Mel Bochner, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella.

Back home in slightly less rarefied air it is interesting to consider how the Francis offering matches up to the Paris’s.

Both auctions are very large with both taking up two days to get through the lots. The Paris collection came in at 230 lots with 72 of them going under the hammer on the first night. With the Francis collection there is a massive 481 lots with 122 being offered on the first night.

The Paris collection offered nine lots with low estimates over $100,000 and with five of those over $200,000. The Francis collection has 12 lots with low estimates over $100,000 with five of them being over $200,000.

41 percent of the first night offerings at the Paris auction were abstract works, while at the Francis collection it will be 34.4 percent abstract on the first night.

The Paris collection included sixteen sculptures while the Francises will offer eight, but the Francis auction also includes 195 lots of ceramics and 63 lots of books and catalogues.
 
Pretty evenly matched although when you look through the catalogues (Paris catalogue here) two very different approaches to collecting.
 
You can see the catalogue for the Francis collection day one here and day two here.

By the numbers: over there edition

3       the number in millions of people who visit MoMA a year

6.4     the percentage increase (reaching a total of 2,473) in billionaires in the world over the last year

7        the percentage of art sold online globally last year

31      the percentage drop in sales value of art sold through Sotheby’s auction house last year

70      the percentage of operating art museums in the world that were founded after 2000

190    the amount in thousands of dollars that the movie star Alec Baldwin paid for a painting by Ross Bleckner he didn’t want

800    the number of Andy Warhol paintings owned by the New York based Mugrabi family art collection

1,000  the number of portraits David Hockney claims he will paint of ‘his friends, family plus art world movers and shakers’

1,114  the amount in dollars paid per square centimeter for Jean Michael Basquiat’s 1.8 x 2.13 meter painting Dustheads making a total of $67 million

1,575  the number of art museums in the United States

Once round the block

August has come around again, the month when we get to see the art auction equivalent of Battle of the Bands. This year we can enjoy four houses stepping up offering a total of 289 lots. As a snapshot of the NZ art market, of these lots, 17.3 percent are works by women, 78 percent have figurative subjects, and there are too few sculptures to mention although Art + Object does feature a Neil Dawson on its catalogue cover (ok, there are 17 - a miserable 6 percent).

Mossgreen–Webb’s have pumped up the volume with their catalogue now looking more like an A+O effort at 780 square centimeters. For the record A+O comes in at 816 sq cm, Dunbar Sloane at 567sq cm and Bowerbank Ninow at 516 sq cm. M-W’s publication has 43 percent devoted to the catalogue, A+O has 78 percent, BN 53 percent and DS has 81 percent. To help support this publishing landslide, Bowerbank Ninow managed to get 12 pages of advertising, A+O landed 8 and the other two players pulled in just one page between them. 

In terms of lots, M-W has 53, BN 62, A+O has 86 and DS 88 (29 of them by regional painter Trevor Moffitt) in part one of a two day 281 lot auction. And when it comes to the dollars there are only 12 lots across the four with low estimates above $100,000 giving more weight to the chatter that it’s in the $40-50,000 bracket that all the business is being done. 

So contemporary art auctions on 3 (BN), 4 (A+O), 10 (DS) and 11 (M-W) August

By the numbers

2  the number of women currently showing at City Gallery Wellington

3   the number of books to be published by Te Papa Press in 2016

24  the number of policy statements setting out the principles for presenting Len Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster

25  the number of Gordon Walters paintings currently on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery by the Chartwell Collection

29  the number of Trevor Moffitt paintings being sold as consecutive lots (one to 29) at Dunbar Sloane on 10 August

11   the number of years the Britten V1000, the star of Billy Apple’s latest exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery, held the speed record at Ruapuna Raceway

30  the number of documents online relating to the Sarjeant Gallery’s extension and its funding

36   the number of works by Gordon Walters in the collections of the Auckland Art Gallery

100  the number of paintings by Gottfried Lindauer that the Auckland Art Gallery thinks are unaccounted for and possibly held in family collections

220  the amount in dollars needed to purchase Fiona Clark’s Artspace edition Book Shelf, Tikorangi

700  the cost in dollars of lighting a public sculpture (based on Neil Dawson’s Spires in Christchurch) for one year

Road works ahead

Was the Real Art Roadshow truck really travelling around New Zealand for nine years? It's hard to believe it was on the road for so long but news from Art + Object confirms it. Contrary to the website suggesting the project is looking for a buyer, the truck and its contents will be sold. This will bring to an end Fiona Campbell’s exemplary philanthropic project designed to educate school kids in the far corners of the country. 

The auction of the collection will take place on 1 November. So what sort of collection is it? Mark Amery once described it as 'engaging to all but the complete art luddite' and its popular appeal is certainly helped by around 72 percent of the works being figurative rather than abstract art. Most of the collection of 128 works spread across two trucks is made up of paintings and a good proportion of them (just over 75 percent) are by men, so pretty much the perfect mix for a successful art auction. The last two stops for the Real Art Roadshow will be in late September when it will call in at Papakura High School and Rosehill College before being packed up and put to market.
Images: the Real Art Trucks in action

Stay where you are

Put a painting by C F Goldie together with an auction price of $1.175 million and odds are the media are going to suddenly get interested in the visual arts. Last night at the International Art Centre we got a flurry of excitement and a couple of interesting questions. The new owner of the Goldie was unwilling to discuss whether or not he would export the painting to China which raises the question as to just what can be taken out of the country. In fact any protected NZ artwork can only be exported if Government approval is given under the provisions of the 1975 Protected Objects Act. In the case of the Goldie approval would be all but impossible.
 
So what are the rules around NZ art being taken out of the country on a permanent basis? First and foremost it has to be regarded as a ‘protected object’. This classification is pretty sweeping and means something that is ‘part of the movable cultural heritage of New Zealand and that is of importance to New Zealand, or to a part of New Zealand.' Then, if it is over 50 years old and has been made by a New Zealand artist living or dead and is related to New Zealand, it stays unless permission is formally granted.

The 50 year rule is particularly interesting as it is now starting to affect modern artists like Colin McCahon and Don Binney and Gordon Walters. As the 50 year date line line moves forward, any of works created pre-1966 are now subject to export restrictions.

Is there a Doctor in the house?

It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of university scholars spruiking art for auction house catalogues would have been shocking. Today such catalogues are one of the go-to places for readable art history by both academics and serious art writers. In the latest Art + Object catalogue Colin McCahon expert Peter Simpson makes a careful analysis of McCahon’s seventies works on Steinbach paper while discussing Rocks in the sky, series 2, No 2: Lagoon, Muriwai. You get info about the origins of the title, its place in the larger series, consideration of the use of Roman numerals and even a riff on what the subtitle might be pointing to. By the time he brings up the five wounds of Christ (another of McCahon’s key themes) you're with him wondering whether the large V shape could even be the tear of a spear wound. The A+O catalogue has also mustered Professor Laurence Simmons, Professor Emeritus Michael Dunn, Dr Oliver Stead and Dr Kriselle Baker. Bowerbank Ninow were playing the same game with their last photography catalogue including essays by Dr Andrew Paul Wood. He nails Ans Westra's sensibility noting that 'While Westra is not afraid to appeal to sentiment, she never romanticises human life.' Wood also drags up a great quote from American photographer William Eggleston talking to novelist Donna Tartt in Artforum from way back in 2001. Nice. University art history departments will now be lining up these catalogues on their library shelves for more than just the pictures.

Pics

In the raging world of art prices, one of the great media is consistently undervalued. Playing off this Bowerbank Ninow have just published a photography-only catalogue for their next auction. For around the price of a small Colin McCahon drawing you could set the foundations of a very serious photography collection and you wouldn't need to confine yourself to local photographers either. For instance, here’s what you could get for $23,300 based on the high estimate for each work.

Ian Macdonald’s The whale stranding at Muriwai Beach (72)
William Eggleston’s Untitled (Kentucky) (42)
Thomas Ruff’s Anderes Doppelportrait I (39)
Untitled 1974 by Glenn Busch (33)
Gavin Hipkins Untitled (44)
Ans Westra, Lunchtime Concert, Cuba Mall (19)
Frank Hofmann’s untitled photo of a woman blowing smoke (15)
Rhondda Bosworth’s Susy Suzie / another figure study (14)
Datura by Peter Peryer (10)
Marie Shannon’s Indoor Fireworks (7)
Another Frank Hofmann, Diving Tower, Prague (1)

And given that some of them might go under the high estimate, let’s also throw in American artist Mike Kelley’s intriguing Black out (Detroit River), Detail Panel 1 (41)

You can see the full catalogue here.

Image: Untitled (Kentucky) by William Eggleston

Hammer horror

Webb’s must curse the day they decided to load their auctions with fancy names. Differentiation strategies are ok when you can deliver the goods, but a big fat pain in the neck when you can't. Take the upcoming Webb's April auction that has been trotted out under the 'Paramount' banner. The catalogue has been published online so who could resist shaking the numbers to figure out what's Paramount means in Webb's speak? Not us. 

The fact is only two of the 117 works on offer have low estimates over $40,000. Even if you add up the high estimates on these two they'd only hammer down at $245,000. That wouldn’t have bought you a major work by Bill Hammond five years ago. It’s true that works over $100,000 are rarer than they were back then but 'Paramount' ? To have less than 12 percent of your high estimates over $20,000 and 88 percent below $10,000 is well, certainly rather challenging to the meaning of the word. Can Webb’s recapture its old ground under new management? Looking at this latest catalogue it’s going to be a long, hard slog.

Underground art surfaces

As we mentioned last year, the Fletcher Trust has off-loaded a chunk of its art collection. The reason given was that limited office space had required the company to pull down walls to create open plan office space. In the language of wordmath:

 Now, along with its offices, meeting rooms and foyers, Fletchers also had a rather more exciting space - a James Bond style gallery. It was in the form of a tunnel that went under the road to link two office blocks. Any staff members who scurried from one office across to the other also got to see a large selection of art works in rather spooky conditions. You could have passed by any number of paintings from something by Dick Frizzell to works by Gretchen Albrecht or Dan Arps. You can check out the complete Fletcher collection here. Sadly that unusual experience is now in the past.  The tunnel has been closed with the doors at both ends locked shut. That could mean it’s more art to the block or maybe this time it will go into store or perhaps it will stay exactly where it is sealed like some kind of strange time capsule waiting for the future. You can read more about this unique arty tunnel here in the NZH.

Image: top, the eerie Fletcher tunnel and bottom, a work by Dan Arps seen along the way.

Art in the movies: The art of more

Change out the raucous music business  for art and white folk and dah dah - the TV series Empire becomes The art of more. Centered on the battles between two auction houses not a million miles away from Sotheby’s (Parke-Mason) and Christie’s (DeGraaf's), The art of more presents an eclectic range of collectables (cars, space junk and sports memorabilia). Fortunately for OTN art is certainly the lead husky when it comes to cash accumulation. The series producers Chuck Rose and Gardner Stern didn't see the need for an art consultant on the team as they knew themselves what was going on and good for them as it certainly makes the series more fun. A (spoiler alert) faked van Gogh (an odd mix of The starry night, an olive tree painting and some general landscape stuff) easily fools the experts at both Parke-Mason and DeGraaf's as well along with all the other ‘experts’ who inspect it before auction. Well-known paintings from the Met go under that hammer and there's also a contemporary art auction where it gets a little wild. Jeff Koons’s Rabbit is recast as a painting and a stuffed deer in a bath (death-of-Marat-style) takes centre stage. The deer inspires the best art insight of the show when a core cast member explains, 'The artist is saying that it’s a privilege for the deer to die on its own terms and not on the terms of the humans that turned its habitat into concrete and acid rain. That it’s suicide is power.' Dead on.

Images: top to bottom, the fake van Gogh, the Met helps out with auction fodder and conversation with a dead deer

Song of praise

For the November auction season three houses offer thee,

11 Ralph Hoteres
9 Bill Hammonds
7 Stephen Bamburys
4 Allen Maddoxs
4 Michael Parekowhais
3 Shane Cottons
3 Peter Peryers
3 Peter Robinsons
2 Gordon Walterss
2 Pat Hanlys
1 Donald Binney

and at A + O a pic from Jae Hoon Lee

Catalogues: A+O, Webb's, Bowerbank Ninow

Drawing lots

The first catalogue of the Auckland-based auction house Bowerbank Ninow is now online. It’s a small selection with some interesting finds among the 44 works as well reasonable sounding estimates. The et al. installation Mule Table (On the difficult problem in the phenomenal world) would be something of a bargain even at its top estimate of $12,000. They've winkled out some auction favourites too with three works by Shane Cotton, four by W D Hammonds and a couple by Colin McCahons. Photography has been mixed in with Peter Peryer, Yvonne Todd and Michael Parekowhai all represented. Of special interest are three photographs by Mark Adams of Tony Fomison getting his pe'a from Samoan master tattooists. Tony could only endure so much of this demanding process at a time so the full tattoo was created over many venues and many months. We were present at one of the ‘sessions’ that took place in painter Tony Lane’s Island Bay living room with Sese Lemamea in charge of the tapper and chisel. The last two lots are intriguing drawings made by Edward Bullmore for some of his Astro form paintings. This is the series that appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s film Clockwork Orange so some fascinating associations there. As we've posted before, Bowerbank Ninow intend to return a small percentage of the hammer price to the artists.

Images: left, Edward Bullmore sculpture as seen in A Clockwork Orange and right, Edward Bullmore drawing up for sale at Bowerbank Ninow’s auction.

Sold to the gentleman with the tea cup

As expected, for all the talk of renewal, Webb’s has been sold subject to some details being confirmed. The new owner is Mossgreen Auctions. It's based in the Melbourne suburb of Armadale in an old movie theatre with a business model not dissimilar from that of the recently start-up Bowerbank and Ninow on K Road. That means dealer gallery exhibition functions and auctions mashed together. In Mossgreen’s case high tea has also been added to the mix for collectors who like to get close to a well-made scone. ‘It brings in the type of people we’re likely to do business with.’ Along with art Mossgreen also focuses on jewelry, oceanic and tribal art, stamps, coins and postal history. Sound familiar? Unsurprisingly, given the success such events have been over the last ten years, Mossgreen also specialises in single owner auctions in art and design. How Webb's debts were sorted out is unknown but the handover is expected on 1 January next year. LATER: Webb's is to be sold for a potential loss at $800,000 which will be half on agreement and the remaining $400,000 in quarterly instalements.

… and change

The groan you can hear in the air is probably the tectonic plates of the art economy starting to shift. There’s Webb’s plucky experiment with the turnover model in Parnell, the fallout from the Bambury/Jensen settlement, Bowerbank/Ninow testing a dealer auction mash-up, My art offering collectors interest-free cash to buy stuff with, a corporate taking over the Auckland Art Fair and some very sharp words dissing auctions from the world of art dealers.

'If you are wanting to start an art collection, to go to an auction to buy the art is bad practice. You won’t get the best examples and you won’t learn anything: the work is a product, which is an anathema to us.

There are all sorts of pressures that go with auctions, let alone the competition. If you are bidding against one other maniac you will overpay – it’s too dangerous.' 
Dealers Tim Melville and Emma Fox reported in NZ Herald on Saturday
 
Ouch.

Finally there’s a cash and carry online model for art and collectibles being set up by the Fairfax Group of all people. And the media barons look as though they're going straight for the jugular with the simple proposition 'Get Stuff' riffing on the name of their eponymous website. In a sample Facebook page (you can see it here) for instance you could bid for a work by Rohan Wealleans starting with an opening bid of $800 or use the 'buy now' feature and get it directly off the shelf for $1,800. It's a technique that makes most art dealers go pale but in this case at least one (Ivan Anthony) is in on the game with his artists and contact details featuring as the art part in the launch offering. So, as far as art's concerned, even though the site is presented as an auction, the chances of getting a bargain look kind of remote. 

Image: Yvonne Todd. Buy now

Art to go

The news there's a waterfall painting by William Hodges coming up at Christie's Auctions in London must be causing some discussion at Te Papa. Unlike Auckland Art Gallery (proud owners of the iconic View in Dusky Bay, New Zealand) Te Papa has only prints to represent the best-known artist of Captain Cook's second voyage to the Pacific in the 1770s. The painting at Christie's is A Maori at Cascade Cove in Dusky Bay, New Zealand. It's not huge (30 x 45.7 cm) and painted on copper, but it has all the essential elements including a watchful Maori figure, although probably with some prescience, he is looking over his shoulder. The work is estimated at between $160,000 and $230,000 that in terms of recent TeP acquisitions is kind of cheap.

But Te Papa does have other options. If it wants to go down the market, paintings by Hodges are on offer for under a thousand dollars by the hard working folk at Fineart China.com. Buy from them and you don’t have to wait for the Christie's auction on 29 October, they'll knock one up straight away. And it just keeps on getting better. They'll send you a photo of your painting by email as soon as it's ready for your approval and if you're not happy you get your money back. Fineart China offers thirteen different William Hodges paintings including the most famous Dusky Sound version from the National Maritime Museum, but if Te Papa goes down this path that's probably one to avoid. And if you want your own Hodges with a money back guarantee, go here.
 
Image: Fineart China