The Old Masters sales in London this week gave mixed results, with strong demand for some of the top lots tempered by little appetite for middle market works.
The Sotheby’s evening sale on 8 July, led by works from the collection at Castle Howard, fetched a total of £39m, within its estimate of £35m to £51m. Despite only selling 65% by lot, the sale sold 81% by value and set six new artist records for Lucas Cranach the Elder, Ferdinand Bol, John Martin, Fede Galizia, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and Joseph Heintz the Elder. Almost half of the lots had never appeared at auction before: “These were great results for fresh pictures,” said Alex Bell, the co-chairman of Old Master Paintings at Sotheby’s. Around 80% of the works were bought by private collectors.
The sale at Christie’s the following evening fetched a disappointing £19m against an estimate of £32m to £48m, selling 65% by lot and only 49% by value. Many of the evening’s top works failed to sell, and the withdrawal of six lots from the Russborough House collection further damaged the sale. The group, which was estimated to sell for between £5m and £8m and included works by Francesco Guardi and Peter Paul Rubens, was pulled from the auction by the Alfred Beit Foundation following an appeal against their sale by Heather Humphreys, the Irish arts and heritage minister. There were some positives, however, such as the auction records set for Richard Parkes Bonington and Sebastian Vrancx.
Bonham’s sale fetched £1.3m against an estimate of £2.5m to £4m, selling 48% by lot and 58% by value. An early portrait by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Portrait of a girl with a basket of fruit and flowers (1720-1725), estimated at £200,000-£300,000, was withdrawn from the sale at the last minute.
Sotheby’s
The four works from Castle Howard all sold, including Bernardo Bellotto’s Venice, A View of the Grand Canal Looking South from the Palazzo Foscari (1738-39), which was commissioned directly from the artist by the 4th Earl of Carlisle and fetched £2.6m (est £2.5m-£3.5m). The star of the group was Ferdinand Bol’s imposing Portrait of a Boy (1652), or “the ultimate Dutch swagger portrait”, as the dealer Johnny Van Haeften described it, which set an auction record for the artist at £5.2m (est £2m-£3m).
Asian buyers were very active, with one buying the Bol and another buying William Claesz Heda’s Still Life of a Roemer (1663) for £3m (est £2m-£3m). There was also an Asian underbidder for Lucas Cranach the Elder’s record breaking La Bocca della Verità (1525-28), which sold for £9.3m after a lengthy bidding war (est £6-£8m). “The Asian market tends to prefer beautiful, easily digestible and non religious works,” says Andrew Fletcher, a senior director and head of auction sales at Sotheby's.
The disappointment of the evening came when a pair of large full-length portraits of the 3rd Baron Monson of Burton and his wife Elizabeth Capell, painted by Pompeo Batoni and George Romney respectively (est £2m-£3m and £1m-£1.5m) failed to find buyers.
Christie’s
Bidding was sparse at Christie’s where, unlike Sotheby’s, some of the best works, including the Bernardo Bellotto cover lot, Dresden, from the right bank of the Elbe above the Augustus bridge (around 1751-53) failed to sell. Although the Bellotto is one of the last great views of Northern Europe left in private hands, the £8m to £12m estimate proved too punchy for buyers. Three out of four works by the usually popular Pieter Breughel the Younger also failed to sell, “I suspect because the Russians, who usually support his market, are not buying,” Van Haeften says.
Thankfully there were a few silver linings: a large El Greco, Christ on the Cross (between 1600-10), saw some lively bidding and sold at £2.4m (est £1m-£1.5m), as did a newly discovered view of Venice by Francesco Guardi, The Grand Canal, Venice, with San Simeone Piccolo (1770s), which fetched £1.9m (est £1m-£1.5m). Richard Parkes Bonington’s Turneresque painting, A coastal landscape with fisherfolk, a beached boat beyond (around 1826), sold for £2.5m (est £2m-£3m).
