Museums

Tennants is privileged to provide a wide range of professional services to museums, galleries and not-for-profit organisations throughout the UK. Tennants offers industry-leading advice to support institutions with their collection management and loan objectives.

Services offered include:

Appraisals & Valuations

Tennants offers discreet and impartial guidance to help manage liabilities and provides insight into current market values. Services include appraisals from individual objects to entire collections, valuations for auction, loan or insurance purposes, and inventory development.

Consignments

With over eighty sales a year, Tennants covers all major disciplines and specialist areas of collecting; strong sale results and high sold rates are achieved across the board.

Educational and Cultural Support

Tennants is committed to furthering the understanding of The Arts and to making our cultural heritage accessible to all. By forging relationships with new and existing cultural partners, Tennants can facilitate an institution’s need for making collections available to a wider public audience.  In November 2017 Tennants staged ‘350 Years of British Art’, a well-received exhibition which showcased significant works of art loaned from public institutions and private collections. This initiative was followed by ‘Light and Shadow’ in November 2018, which cemented partnerships with lenders such as The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, Sheffield Museums, York Museums Trust, Derby Museums and The Bowes Museum, County Durham.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when museums and institutions were forced to remain closed, Tennants collaborated closely with some of the leading public collections in the North to present 'Female Artists', an online exhibition celebrating female artists from the 18th century to the 21st century. Alongside images kindly loaned by The Bowes Museum, Sheffield Museums, York Museums Trust, The Hepworth Wakefield and Harrogate Museums are a host of paintings, sculpture and prints handled by Tennants Auctioneers, and the virtual exhibition offers a chance to see rare works by female artists that are now in private collections.

Tennants acts in an advisory capacity with several municipal collections, helping these institutions realise their objectives and responsibilities. Collaborations have also led to exciting and accessible displays of museum collections at Tennants renowned and much visited premises.