Saving Van Dyck’s Self-portrait

Oh, the perils of social media – post in haste, repent at leisure. Yesterday on this blog’s Facebook page I remarked that I was:

Sending donation to @artfund #savevandyck but awaiting their response to Bryan Sewell

With a link to an article by Brian Sewell which had appeared in the London Evening Standard. Facebook turns posts immediately into tweets as can be seen below:

Not only had I misspelt “Brian”, but worse I hadn’t checked subsequent issues of the Standard for any responses. As you can see, this omission was pointed out by Sandy Nairne @Boathouseman who, much to my embarrassment, is the Director of the National Portrait Gallery. All I can offer by way of apology is to reproduce his letter to the ES (Wed 4 Dec, page 51) below:

I was glad to see that he thinks a system for matching auction bids, as Sewell suggested, might be feasible in the future. And this is the link that matters.