Sotheby's Old Master evening sale
December 5 2013
Picture: BG
Sotheby's evening Old Master sale netted a healthy £33.5m last night, coming in some way above Christie's £21.8m. Auctioneer Henry Wyndham was in his usual good form. The top lot was a pair of Canalettos, at £9.6m (inc. premium). The evening's bargain was a powerful, unfinished portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Sir Thomas Lawrence (above), which made £962k with premium, selling at the low estimate. I thought this picture would fly, and would make more than the less alluring Lawrence of Wellington sold at Christie's in 2006 for £2m.
Selling well above the expectations, and justly, was a compelling Spanish-period Rubens portrait, which sold for £3.2m, beating its £400k-£600k estimate. Strangely, an x-ray revealed that it was painted on top of a portrait by Velazquez. The sitter of the Rubens portrait is unknown, but could it in fact be a portrait of Velazquez himself? There has long been uncertainty over some of Velazquez's putative self-portraits. But if, like me, you think there is mileage in the old theory that the sitter in both the Met's unfinished portrait and the fellow in the background of the Surender of Breda are Velazquez, then could the Rubens show the same sitter?
