TEHRAN Canberra's National Portrait Gallery in Sydney has paid 5.3 million dollars for a 218-year-old portrait of Captain James Cook the biggest single art purchase made by an Australian institution.
According to an AFP report, the price tag surpassed the previous record of 4.6 million dollars paid by the National Gallery of Australia last year for English contemporary artist David Hockney's a bigger grand canyon.
The 1782 work by John Webber, which has a somewhat checkered history, arrived in Sydney from London Tuesday night and will be unveiled by Prime Minister John Howard at the gallery next week.
The Howard government, which funds the gallery, contributed 2.8 million dollars with two Sydney businessmen, Robert Oatley and John Schaeffer, putting up 1.25 million dollars each.
For more than 150 years the portrait was owned by the corporation of the Hull Trinity House, a British benevolent organization for mariners.
It turned up in Melbourne at a Sotheby's sale in 1983, where it was bought by London art dealer Angela Nevill on behalf of disgraced Australian businessman Alan Bond. It hung in his Perth office until 1990 when it disappeared, emerging in Switzerland three years later.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Nevill attempted to sell the painting in 1994 to the National Gallery of Australia but the sale fell through as ownership could not be established.
In 1996 Richard England, liquidator of Southern Equities, formally known as Bond Corporation Holdings, found it in a vault in Nevill's office following a visit by Britain's serious fraud squad.
For the past three years England and Nevill have been hammering out ownership titles and working on a sale.