Warwick Castle pictures at Sotheby's
November 11 2015
Picture: Sotheby's
It is with some sadness that I see number of important paintings are being sold from Warwick Castle in Sotheby's London Old Master evening sale. There's a Studio of Holbein portrait of Henry VIII (above) estimated at £800k-£1.2m (lot 9), and a Van Dyck portrait of Henrietta Maria at £1.5m-£2.5m (lot 28). The pictures were bought with the castle when acquired by the Tussauds Group in the 1970s. You can see the pictures in the print catalogue here (the online version is not yet up).
Warwick Castle is a great place, but over the years little effort has been made to make their great art collection a part of the castle's story. For a while recently, it looked as if they were going to make more of their pictures, and I was asked to advise on one or two works, even making a little discovery (a picture partly by Van Dyck). But now a different approach has evidently been taken. The Castle is part of the Merlin group, who also own Alton Towers, where a roller coaster disaster recently left scores of people with serious injuries. Perhaps - and I'm guessing - the decision to sell is related to the financial losses that followed.
Anyway, the two pictures are important things. The Henry VIII I examined closely in situ some years ago. It's of extremely good quality, and in my view better than a very similar version sold just recently by Sotheby's from Castle Howard (for £965k). The Henrietta Maria would seem cheap at £1.5m-£2.5m, but perhaps the cautious estimate is due to the fact that a) it's a second version (the original is in a private collection in New York) and b) it was extended at some point in the 18th Century into a full-length (by, it is said, Sir Joshua Reynolds).
