The 18th century oil on wood panel portrait of a man with a bugle was one of the lots up for sale at Burstow and Hewett’s final auction of 2020.

More than 100 years after Vincent van Gogh created ‘The Starry Night,’ the painting’s swirls of yellows, blues and browns continue to fascinate, seemingly dancing around one another and making viewers feel as if the sky is enveloping them.

David Hockney’s 1980 landscape painting ‘Nichols Canyon’ will go on offer at the upcoming Phillips contemporary evening sale, scheduled to take place on December 7. The painting carries an estimate of around $35 million, according to a press release from Phillips, and is billed as “unequivocally the most important landscape by the artist in private hands.” The hefty price tag makes it Hockney’s most expensive landscape to ever appear at auction, and, if its estimate is achieved, would place the work in the artist’s top three most expensive auction results.

Arts & Culture Desk

Banksy’s reimagining of Claude Monet’s impressionist water lilies fetched more than £7.5m at auction, easily surpassing expectations.

After 23 years since it was stolen and 10 months since its discovery, a Gustav Klimt painting is returning to view.

A rare painting by Korean folk painting master Kim Hong-do from the Joseon era (1392-1910) returned to Korea after decades, finding a new owner in the home country.

A large painting shaped like the letter A is installed in the middle of a dark room at the Arario Museum in Space in Seoul. As gallery visitors walk around the structure and turn each corner, they encounter a different theme.

Music, conversation, weather, travels. They synthesize into our perception of the world, reminding us that we are part of a larger community, even when our world seems to have shrunk to the size of a window pane.

A new retelling of the drama and mystery surrounding the world's most expensive painting is set to take the stage in New York in 2022 as a major Broadway musical.

An Iranian artist found her way into the final stage of a painting contest held by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

A hidden drawing by Pablo Picasso was found beneath one of the artist’s abstract paintings, called ‘Still Life.’

Dutch detectives are investigating two apparent “proof of life” photographs of a £5m Vincent van Gogh painting stolen from a museum during the coronavirus lockdown.

One of art's great modern mysteries involving the world's most expensive painting could soon be resolved.

By Sebastian Smee*