The more international auction houses lean into luxury and contemporary art, the more Old Masters are in danger of looking like an archaic outlier. Yet London’s latest series of sales showed that this most traditional of collecting fields, at least at the very top level, is still alive and can kick.
On Wednesday afternoon at Bonhams, now under the leadership of the luxury retail doyenne Chabi Nouri, two recently rediscovered late 18th century genre paintings, or “fancy pictures,” of young street sellers by Johann Zoffany sold to a telephone buyer for £991,000 (with fees) against a low estimate of £300,000. The Watercress Girl and The Flower Girl had remained in near-untouched condition in the family of Zoffany’s patron, Jacob Wilkinson, since the 1780s.
“These were my pictures of the week,” says Anthony Crichton-Stuart, the director of Agnew’s, one of two London dealerships that bid for the paintings in the room.
Johann Joseph Zoffany's The Flower Girl and The Watercress Girl
Courtesy of Bonhams
German-born Zoffany enjoyed a successful career in London as a portrait painter, becoming a friend of the celebrated actor, David Garrick. Jane Wallis, the named model for The Watercress Girl, painted in 1780, was thought to have been an actress in Garrrick’s circle. These two studies of young women had an empathetic immediacy unusual in 18th century British painting.
After centuries of intensive trading, London’s main biannual auctions of Old Master paintings, particularly in December (which has a shorter gathering period than July), tend to be tales of such isolated highlights, buried in quantities of more mediocre decorative pictures. At Bonhams, for instance, the remaining 50 lots in its Old Master sale—now rebranded “The Classics”—raised just over £600,000 with fees.
“The material available has become very thin. There seem to be few triple-A quality pictures left in private hands and these come to the market sparsely,” says the Amsterdam-based art consultant Johan Bosch van Rosenthal. “The market is increasingly dependent on discoveries or re-attributions.”
This dynamic was evident the previous evening when Christie’s offered an enigmatic, immaculately preserved Giambattista Tiepolo canvas of masked Punchinelli characters from the Commedia dell’arte, not seen in public since the 1930s.
“The Tiepolo was a discovery. It was in beautiful condition, and is art-historically important because the subject shows an association with his son,” says Stijn Alsteens, a former Christie’s specialist in Old Master drawings, now director of the Fondation Custodia in Paris, referring to how Tiepolo’s more celebrated depictions of Commedia characters are now thought to have been inspired by his father. “There are still things to get excited about,” added Alsteens.
Tiepolo's canvas of masked Punchinelli characters from the Commedia dell’arte
Courtesy of Christie's
This museum-quality painting, from a French private collection, was pushed by at least four bidders to £2.5m (with fees) against a low estimate of £1m. The day after the sale, the Louvre announced that it was the buyer.
Van Dyck’s big, early study of an Andalusian horse from around 1621 had previously sold at auction in 2000 for £774,000. Since then, the artist’s only known landscape oil sketch was discovered on the back of the canvas, giving buyers the chance to purchase two Van Dyck oils for the price of one. This time round, it was bought by a telephone bidder for £3.4m (with fees). “If you like horses, it’s great. If you like Van Dyck, it’s a strange picture,” says the London-based restorer, Simon Gillespie.
Insiders were so certain that Francesco Hayez’s self-consciously seductive 1827 female nude, Bathesheba, would make a high price that they were asked to offer sealed bids to guarantee the painting. The guarantor, who was not the buyer, would have made a tidy commission on the painting as the bidding soared to £1.5m (with fees), an auction record for the artist, against a low estimate of £600,000.
Major paintings by the early 19th century Italian artist Hayez rarely appear at auction and this celebrated canvas had fetched a record $1.1m when it was rediscovered in 1998.
Christie’s compact 23 lot sale raised £14m (with fees) against a low estimate of £7.2m. A judicious combination of three withdrawals and six lots offered without reserve resulted in just three lots failing to sell. The total was, however, significantly lower than the £23.5m Christie’s achieved in its equivalent sale last December.
Sotheby’s similarly sized Old Master & 19th century paintings sale the following evening contained 25 lots, but did include a work by Sandro Botticelli, one of the few true “trophy” names that appeal to a wider spectrum of collectors.
Francesco Hayez's painting of Bathsheba
Courtesy of Christie's
The 33-inch-high panel painting, The Virgin and Child enthroned, was thought to be a relatively early work by Botticelli from around 1470, before the Florentine artist had developed a sizeable studio operation. Though “generally ascribed to the artist’s workshop,” the early date of the picture and the “singular beauty” of its figure painting encouraged Sotheby’s to catalogue the lot as by Botticelli, without the qualifiers “and studio” or “workshop”.
The painting had emerged fresh to the market from the renowned Loyd Collection in Berkshire, having been purchased back in 1904. This provenance, together with its estimate of just £2m-£3m (enticingly low for a world-famous artist whose works have fetched up to $92.2m at auction), helped trigger a level of competition more characteristic of contemporary sales. No fewer than nine telephone bidders contested the work, two of whom were collectors of contemporary art, according to Sotheby’s. The hammer eventually fell at £10m (with fees).
“I thought a lot of the painting was autograph Botticelli. It was always going to fly,” says the London dealer Charles Beddington. “The atmosphere was quiet until the sale, then everybody came out firing. There were several unfamiliar faces in the room.”
One such unfamiliar face gave £2.9m (with fees) for a rare, rediscovered Virgin and Child with the Infant John the Baptist (around 1515) by the Mannerist artist Rosso Fiorentino, estimated at £2m-£3m.
There was also plenty of competition for what appeared to be an enormous late 19th century chocolate boxy genre painting of a comedian giving an impromptu performance to a crowd in front of the city hall in Rothenburg, Bavaria. Dating from 1892, this was the last work of Ernst Klimt, the younger brother of Gustav Klimt, who died later that year aged 29. Gustav completed the work by inserting hyper-realistic portraits of Klimt family members in the 18th century audience, then signed the canvas with his brother’s name. This extraordinary collaboration sold for £2.2m (with fees) against an estimate of £300,000-£500,000.
Sotheby’s raised a total of £24.2m (with fees) with six lots unsold, an improvement on last December’s £19.4m. However, the result was still well down on the £32.7m achieved in December 2022, and this week’s sale was padded out with prints by Rembrandt and Goya. Yet there was noticeably more energy in the bidding both at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, particularly online.
“I’m getting happier. There’s more action,” says the Geneva-based Old Masters dealer Salomon Lilian. “There’s so much more money being made in the world through things like stocks and Bitcoin,” Lilian adds, explaining the change in mood.