Dubai Vol. 1

This is set of 3 paintings by Goya, Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel is an oil-on-canvas painting made by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya around 1805. The portrait depicts Isabel Lobo Velasco de Porcel, who was born at Ronda around 1780 and was the second wife of Antonio Porcel. Isabel's husband was 25 years older than she, and they met when she was 20 years old. Antonio Porcel was a liberal and associate of Manuel Godoy, Prince of the Peace, who was a friend of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, who in turn brought him in contact with Goya, who lived nearby; the painting is said to have been a gift from the artist in return for hospitality. A Goya portrait of Antonio Porcel, though much larger and so not a matching piece, was lost in a fire when the Jockey Club in Buenos Aires was destroyed in a riot in 1953.

 This painting by Francisco Goya, the Portrait of the Duke of Wellington is a painting of the British general Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington during the latter's service in the Peninsular War. One of three portraits Goya painted of Wellington, it was begun in 1812, after the subject's entry into Madrid, showing him as an earl in red uniform and wearing the Peninsular Medal. The artist then modified it in 1814 to show him in full dress black uniform with gold braid and to add the Order of the Golden Fleece and Military Gold Cross with three clasps (both of which Wellington had been awarded in the interim).

It was auctioned in 1961, with the New York collector Charles Wrightsman bidding £140,000. The Wolfson Foundation offered £100,000 and the government added a special Treasury grant of £40,000, matching Wrightsman's bid and obtaining the painting for the National Gallery in London, where it was first put on display on 2 August 1961.

 It was stolen nineteen days later, on 21 August 1961. It was later returned and Kempton Bunton confessed to the crime in July 1965.

The stamp album

This is the one and only album my father had. Here he kept his favorite stamps. True, he had a little mountain of stamps but HERE in this very album lie little pieces of art... and by saying art I mean literally. I remember as a child, I was always hovering upon it, drinking it's beautiful contents, feeling amazed and excited i got to look through "daddy's book with little pictures"...
Every time i opened the stamp album i could sense the magic in it and i was instantly traveling through time, giving myself different questions, who got this stamp first? Why would someone put this on an envelope? What was written in the letter inside the envelope this stamp was on? To whom? Where?

In the beginning....

              My father, was a great man. He was noble, generous, honorable, cheerful, merciful, wise... He was also a great story-teller, His eyes were flickering like emerald flames when he was telling a story, ah, those creative and wondrous stories...(maybe sometimes i will post some) I love the fact I have his eyes, also his hobby was stamp collecting but like any other angel sent on Earth he had to leave us early but I inherited my father's collection, his passion, his excitement when near those little pieces of paper...