Flemish tourist board acquires castle that belonged to Rubens

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Visit Flanders to acquire Rubens’ Elewijt Castle | A castle once owned by Peter Paul Rubens in Elewijt, Belgium, is to be acquired by the Visit Flanders tourist board. The painter lived at Elewijt Castle, also known as the ‘Castle of Het Steen’, for the final five years of his life, painting a number of masterpieces there including A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (c. 1636). The castle was put up for sale in February, with an asking price of €4m. Peter De Wilde, the CEO of Visit Flanders, wrote on Twitter today (24 May) that ‘we intend to give [the castle] back to the community, inhabitants and visitors alike’.

Rebecca Pow replaces Michael Ellis as UK arts minister | Rebecca Pow has been appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport. She replaces Michael Ellis, who had occupied the post since January 2018; Ellis has become Minister of State at the Department for transport.

Aberdeen Art Gallery receives £1m from BP | The Aberdeen Art Gallery, which is due to reopen this autumn after a four-year redevelopment, has been given £1m by the oil company BP. As part of the agreement, the BP Portrait Award will return to the gallery next year, and a section of the new second-floor extension will be named the ‘BP Galleries’.

Asian artefacts stolen from Bath museum recovered – in a broken state | Eighteen artefacts that were stolen from the Museum of East Asian Art in Bath last April have been recovered by police. All have been damaged to some extent; a Ming dynasty bowl has been returned to the museum in shards, and the lid of a rare bamboo box in the shape of a crab has been badly broken. More than 20 stolen artworks are still missing.

Recommended reading | Betsy Morais attended a rehearsal for a ‘ballet kink’ performance at the Guggenheim Museum’s Young Collectors’ Party for the New Yorker. In the London Review of Books, Nicholas Penny discusses the different histories of male and female nudes in the Renaissance.

Art news daily will return on Tuesday 28 May.