Dutch police were on Thursday hunting for thieves who stole a museum safe containing a potentially deadly poison used by South American tribes to lace their arrows for hunting. The thieves broke into an outbuilding of the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave in the eastern town of Leiden early on Wednesday and stole the refrigerator-sized, free-standing safe in which the ancient vial holding the poison was being stored. “It’s a poison called curare, which is used in South America on arrows to kill animals,” Amito Haarhuis, director of what is the national Dutch museum of science and medicine, told AFP. “It was offered to us recently as part of a collection, but we decided we didn’t want to have it. So we locked it in the safe and we are going to have it destroyed safely,” he said. The poison is quite dried out and looks like a small “black sugar cube” contained in an ancient glass pot with a red lid, and a label saying “Curare”. In a warning to the public, police said it was “very toxic and can be fa

Today at Sotheby’s, a stunning Swiss landscape by Britain’s favourite artist, J.M.W. Turner sold for £2 million, among the top prices ever achieved for a watercolour by the artist. Created in the final years of the artist’s life and widely considered to be the pinnacle of his achievements in the medium, The Lake of Lucerne from Brunnen depicts one of the most dramatic landscapes in the Swiss Alps, capturing the view over the picturesque village of Brunnen on the eastern shores of Lake Lucerne. Inspired by Turner’s travels to the region between 1841 and 1844, the work was commissioned by Turner’s great patron Elhanan Bicknell to hang as a companion piece to the iconic Blue Rigi, which achieved a record price at Sotheby’s in 2006 and now hangs in Tate Britain . Works from Turner’s ‘late’ Swiss series, of which this is one, have come to be seen as the ‘climax of a lifetime devoted to the expression of light and colour’. Mark Griffith-

Visitors to London’s Regents Park this summer will be met with the unusual sight of a giant penguin and a dancing hare as part of an annual sculpture fair. For the second year, Frieze Sculpture will take over the famous park’s English Gardens for three months, showcasing the work of 25 international artists, free of charge. Curator Clare Lilley, from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, said the event would allow the public to experience “a snapshot of the fantastic imagination of artists and variety of sculpture being made today”. The “celebration of sculpture”, which opens on Wednesday, brings together a diverse roster of artists, including South Korea’s Kimsooja, India’s Bharti Kher and Britain’s Larry Achiompang. “There is a geographic spread: the artists come from South Africa, South Korea, Scandinavia, Europe and the United States,” Lilley told AFP. “In terms of age too, there is a nice span, since Haroon Gunn-Salie, from South Africa, is 29, whereas John Balderssari, from the United

Artemis Gallery hosted a June 20-21 Connoisseurs Auction of exquisite antiquities, Asian and ethnographic art that set a new house record while attracting a legion of new collectors. The fully vetted 481-lot selection, with provenance from some of the world’s finest collections, followed a timeline that started in Ancient Egypt and proceeded through the centuries to the colonial settlements of the New World. In all, the sale surpassed the company’s previous auction record by a remarkable 77 percent. “Quality and authenticity are of paramount importance to our clientele, but they also want the assurance that what they’re bidding on is legal to purchase and, if ever desired, to resell. We offer an unconditional, broad-spectrum guarantee to buyers that we believe is unsurpassed anywhere,” said Artemis Gallery Executive Director Teresa Dodge. “We create a comfort level that is essential to have in pla