Modern Claims against Auction Houses: Sotheby’s v Mark Weiss Ltd and Ors [2020] EWCA Civ 1570, Noted and Analysed
Introduction Frans Hals was a mildly successful seventeenth-century Dutch old master who specialised in portraits. Few of his works have persisted in popular cultural consciousness in the intervening 400 years. One exception is the Laughing Cavalier, painted in 1624, which remains on display in the Wallace Collection in London. The Laughing Cavalier was once described by the Harvard art historian Seymour Slive as ‘one of the most brilliant of all Baroque portraits’.[1] But interest in...
