When it comes to my favourite Old Masters sales, most people know that I like them offbeat, and Sotheby’s sale on 25 January features several beautiful and compelling pictures of that sort by mostly unfamiliar masters. Here are two of them.
The first is a remarkable canvas by the late 16th-century Florentine artist Domenico Cresti (also known as Passignano), Bathers at San Niccolo (1638; est $700,000-$900,000), depicting a gathering of lithe, muscular nude men frolicking in the river Arno during what appears to be laundry day. Against this cheerful gaggle of aquatic calisthenics are two men, one seated nude but for his straw hat pointing to what might be a secluded spot, while his friend in the water gazes longingly at him, their hands almost touching, transforming what at first glance might seem just playful variation of Michelangelo’s famous Battle of Cascina (1504) into a masterpiece of barely concealed homoeroticism.
In recent years, it is has become obvious that audiences cannot get enough of Caravaggio, and museum exhibitions of his paintings and those of his followers are now almost yearly events. One of the lots at Sotheby’s is an unusually haunting expression of the master’s tenebrism: A Young Woman Holding a Distaff Before a Lit Candle (date unknown), an exceptionally fine canvas by the seldom-encountered Flemish painter Adam de Coster. The life-sized serving girl, clad in a red-fur-trimmed gown and an exotic striped linen turban, looks directly and warily at the viewer, as if encountered in a dark stairwell, the direct flame of her candle shielded by the knot of flax on her distaff.
Although scholars are divided about whether De Coster visited Italy, his spooky serving girl did, residing in a noble collection in Palermo from the 17th to the 20th century. It made its last appearance on the market at Sotheby’s New York in January 1992, when it sold for $418,000. Consigned from the collection of the banker Jacqui Safra, it is now estimated at $1.5m to $2m.
Coinciding with the sale is Master Drawings New York (21-28 January), which sees 24 Old Masters galleries, some local and some visiting from Europe, co-ordinate a flurry of exhibitions throughout the city’s Upper East Side.