Jeremy Deller’s turn on Desert Island Discslast weekend gave us some first-rate musical selections as well as his mum’s assessment of his artistic success. ‘I was struck by the movement of a couple in an endless desert, sexual and dreamlike.’ ‘It was incredible,’ she writes of her first glimpse of the work, a copy the artist made of an earlier painting destroyed in a house fire.

In a new memoir, Henoa – who bought works by artists including including Claudio Bravo, Fernando Botero and Édgar Negret – reveals that Dalí’s The Dance, which she acquired in the 1980s, occupied a special place in her heart. Though Escobar was not much interested by the arts (he preferred vintage cars), his wife Victoria Eugenia Henao was quite the collector. But drugs – or the fortune they built for the late cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar – most certainly ‘did’ Dalí.

‘And as I stood back to admire my handiwork, up jumped our cat, landing forcefully in the centre of the painting with a crunch.’ The cat, he added, is ‘not a fan of John Michael Wright, and regrets nothing.’ I probably spent the same again cleaning and reframing it,’ Grosvenor told the paper. Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, the art historian and Britain’s Lost Masterpieces presenter revealed that he had been busy restoring a painting by the 17th-century portrait artist John Michael Wright when Padme, Grosvenor’s pet cat, decided to put a claw through it. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum storiesĪrt sleuth Bendor Grosvenor has suffered something of a cat-astrophe. Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world.

Bendor grosvenor