A prominent New Zealand dealer has admitted to having sold a work by Edward Bullamore and not passing the proceeds on to his widow. He says he lost the paperwork that would have shown him where to send the owner’s share of the $5000 sale. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be an isolated incident for the artist:
The Sunday Star-Times revealed last weekend that around 140 Bullmore works are missing or unaccounted for and that many others were sold by the artist’s brother-in-law and Christchurch art dealer Pat Condon without accounting to the owner, Bullmore’s widow Jacqueline.
Condon sold one major work, a portrait of Jacqueline when she was pregnant, to Te Papa museum for $150,000 but failed to pass on the proceeds to her.
A Star-Times investigation into what happened to the Bullmore collection, recently valued in its entirety at $3.6 million, has found that around 10 paintings were exhibited and put up for sale at the John Leech Gallery in 1990, which Gow and his parents ran together.
Four works sold, others were sent to Condon in Christchurch, and Gow retained four works in the hope of being able to sell them. One of these was a watercolour of a pile of dead trees called Mamaku Landscape (Log Pile), completed the year before Bullmore’s death in 1978, as well as a nude study.
Art dealer acknowledges ‘missing’ Bullmore was sold (Stuff.co.nz)
