Category: Auctions
Sleeper alert!
July 10 2015
Picture: Bonhams
This picture, which was displayed unframed in two pieces on a table, soared above its £7,000-£10,000 estimate at Bonhams to make £230,500. The picture was catalogued as Follower of Francesco Furini, but the name of Jacques Blanchard has been whispered to AHN. I looked at it during the viewing, but couldn't make head nor tail of the likely artist. Way off piste for me...
New Gainsborough drawing discovery
June 30 2015
Picture: Bainbridges Auctions
A newly discovered drawing by Thomas Gainsborough is to be sold at auction, with an estimate of £20,000-£30,000. More here.
£71m sale - 'strong prices' or a 'flop'?
June 24 2015
Picture: Christie's
Such is the twitchiness among some that we're at bursting point in the art market that even the mildest setback is interpreted as a disaster. Yesterday's Impressionist sale at Christie's made £71m, and was led by the above £10.8m Monet. But a few duff lots have led to Bloomberg headlining the sale a 'flop'.
One such was a Picasso portrait which sold for £4.5m, despite having been bought for $6.8m in 2010. Apparently, the fact that the vendor didn't quadruple their money in just five years on an average painting by Picasso is a portent of art market armageddon.
Needless to say, the Christie's press release of the sale gives an extremely rosy view, heralding 'strong prices across the breadth of the category'. The truth lies somewhere between the two.
Gurlitt Liebermann to be sold
May 25 2015
Picture: NYT
A picture by Max Liebermann (above) that formed part of the Gurlitt collection is to be sold at Sotheby's with an estimate of £550,000. The picture has been consigned by David Toren, who is 90, and remembers seeing the picture being looted by the Nazis in 1938. The New York Times reports:
Mr. Toren, who lives now in New York, last saw the painting when he was 13, the day after Kristallnacht in 1938. It was hanging in the conservatory of his uncle’s country estate in Germany on the day that Mr. Friedmann, a brick factory owner, was forced to sign over his home to a Nazi general.
The painting was sold by Nazi authorities after Mr. Friedmann’s death of natural causes in 1942 and ended up in the hands of Hildebrandt Gurlitt, a Nazi-era art dealer. Three years later, the painting was seized by the “Monuments Men” unit for the allies and stored in Wiesbaden. But because of missing documentation, the painting was returned to Mr. Gurlitt in 1950 and ultimately hung on a wall in the Munich apartment of his son, Cornelius Gurlitt.
Sleeper Alert!
May 8 2015
Picture: Sheffield Auctions
The above picture sold for £64,000 hammer today, against an estimate of £100-£150. It was catalogued as 'Manner of Castiglione', though the composition has an air of Bassano. Bizarre surface.
New Leighton drawing discovered
May 6 2015
Video: Sotheby's
A newly discovered drawing by Lord Leighton (below), a study for his 'Flaming June', will be sold by Sotheby's as part of their 'Duchess' sale - featuring items from the estate of Mary, Duchess of Roxburgh.
The sale is the subject of the above video, in which Sotheby's goes for the full 'Downton Abbey' effect. It works rather well.
Anyway, more details of the drawing here.
$363m
May 6 2015
Video: Sotheby's
Sotheby's New York Modern & Impressionist sale brought in $363m yesterday. The above featured Van Gogh made $66m, and sold to an Asian collector. More here.
London mid-season OMP sales
May 4 2015
Picture: Sotheby's
The 'mid-season' Old Master sales were held in London last week, and one or two prices caught my eye. The above Virgin and Child was offered at Sotheby's as 'Workshop of Murillo', with only one enticing line of cataloguing; 'This appears to be a unique composition'. The estimate was £15,000-£20,000, and I wasn't surprised to see it make £269,000 (inc. premium).
At Christie's South Kensingon, the above 'Follower of Van Dyck' made £104,500 against an estimate of £3,000-£5,000. It was the second time I had seen the picture at auction (it came up about a year ago, in a minor UK sale, if I recall correctly), but the first time I had seen it in the flesh. It is plainly a copy, and the speculative high price is all the more suprising when we consider that the original (below), of which there can be no doubt, sold in 2010 at Sotheby's in New York, for $1.53m.
The only picture I bid on last week - but alas unsuccessfully - was the below 'Follower of Claude', which made £206,500 against an estimate of £7,000-£10,000. Neither landscapes nor Claude come within my limited area of expertise, but I thought the picture looked right for early Claude. It had been rejected as the work of an imitator in the 1961 Claude catalogue raisonné. We may yet see it again, as the real thing.
Sleepers Alert!
April 27 2015
Pictures: Shannon's Auction, Charterhouse Auction, and Neil Jeffares via Twitter.
It's a been a busy week for the sleeper hunters. At Shannon's auction in the USA, the above 'possibly 14th/15th Century Italian School' panel made $144,000 against an estimate of $6,000-$8,000. I've no idea who it's by, not my area.
At Charterhouse Auction in Dorset, the below small canvas called 'Follower of El Greco' made £98,000 (inc. premium) against an estimate of just a few hundred pounds. I asked for some better photos of the picture, but didn't bid.
And somewhere in Europe (I learn via Neil Jeffares) the below pastel study by Maurice Quentin de La Tour made €11,047 (inc. premium) against an estimate of €400-€500. Neil says on Twitter that it is a 'first preparation for Belle de Zuylen'.
Bacon self-portraits 're-discovered'
April 27 2015
Picture: BBC
When is a 'discovery' not a discovery? When the pictures have been known about all along.
Still, today's Bacon 're-discovery' story is a good bit of PR-ing from Sotheby's [via the BBC]:
Two self-portraits by Francis Bacon are going on public display for the first time after being rediscovered in a private collection, before being sold.
Although experts knew the works by the late painter existed, they had no idea who had bought them.
Descendants of the original owner have decided to sell the paintings, which are expected to fetch up to £15m each.
The artworks are titled Self-Portrait 1975 and Three Studies for Self-Portrait (1980).
A Bacon painting featuring his friend and fellow artist Lucian Freud, became the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction when it fetched $142m (£89m) in New York in 2013.
Oliver Barker, Sotheby's senior international specialist in contemporary art, described the discovery of the portraits as "a pretty extraordinary collecting moment".
"(Art dealer) Marlborough Fine Art kept a photographic archive and so both of these paintings appeared in a book on Bacon's self-portraits, but apart from being reproduced in books they've not been seen," he said.
"We knew of the existence of the paintings but simply had no idea where they could be. The first time I saw these paintings it was such a wonderful awakening. They're both so luminous."
The lonely auctioneer
April 26 2015
A reader has sent me the above photo - of a sale at Christie's South Kensington with no bidders in the room at all. Everything was being bought either on the phone or online. Amazing really.
Sleeper Alert!
April 9 2015
Picture: The Cobbs Auctioneers
This picture was up for sale in the US over the weekend, catalogued as 'School of Veronese', and with an estimate of $2,000-$4,000. The subject is Sultan Bajazid I. It made $390,000!
More images and details here.
Update - a reader alerts me to the original, byVeronese (below), which is in the Collection Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, in Munich. The condition of the picture at auction is such that I wouldn't like to be sure of hazarding an attribution. But it certainly looks like a brave purchase.
Cheap cheap cheap
April 3 2015
Picture: Ebay
Yesterday saw the first auction on Sotheby's new Ebay platform. And from now it seems that all Sotheby's auctions will be available via the Ebay site.
I can't see why Sotheby's ever thought this was a good idea. When it comes to fine art, Ebay is (at least in my experience) invariably a place to buy bad copies and fakes. It's everything a Sotheby's auction is not.
But now you can bid on, for example, an important Van Dyck oil sketch on Ebay, with an estimate of $200,000-$300,000. On the same page, you'll find links to 'Deal Frenzy 70% off', and other such unenticing things. And there's also one of those slightly naff 'see what it looks like in your home' image options (below). The whole thing cheapens both product and seller - mainly because it's obvious that Ebay is the leading site/brand, and not Sotheby's. It looks like Sotheby's is just a regular seller on Ebay, like a random grandmother selling knitwear. The existing Sotheby's online bidding platform is pretty good. I can't see how this will be a success in markets like China, where the luxury of a brand is all-important. Sotheby's is a great brand - why diminish it?
Anyway, have a play around with it yourself, and tell me what you think.
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Castle Howard pictures on the block
March 30 2015
Picture: Castle Howard
The trustees of Castle Howard have consigned up to £10m worth of art to Sotheby's for sale. Among the pictures is the above 'Studio of Holbein' portrait of the portly and aged Henry VIII, in which he is seen holding a staff. It has an upper estimate of £1.2m.
There's also a Bernardo Bellotto on offer. I would link to the Sotheby's press release, but there's some sort of tedious registration form for access to that.
More here in The Guardian. I didn't know that there were now two Howard brothers in charge of the house. Apparently they live in seperate wings.
Update - here is the full Sotheby's press release.
Update II - a reader writes:
A big house with increasingly little to see in it. What after the dispersals at the start of the 20th century, in the 1940s – including Boston’s superb Canaletto – and, relatively recently, the Guercino and Bernini to Edinburgh and the great Gentileschi painted for The Queen’s House now on loan to the National Gallery.
Also, I wonder if the Castle Howard trust will try and claim these sales at 0% Capital Gains Tax, following their victory against the UK government over a similar case.
Van Dyck sketches for sale
March 23 2015
Pictures: Sotheby's
Two very interesting, early Van Dyck head studies are coming up for sale at Sotheby's in New York. They're being sold from the Weldon Collection, and both were recently in the excellent 'Young Van Dyck' exhibition at the Prado - a show so good I went twice.
The first study, above, is of a woman looking up, and is preparatory for Van Dyck's The Drunken Silenus (below, Gemaldegalerie, Dresden). It looks to be in superb condition.
The second work is a study of a boy praying, and he appears in Van Dyck's Suffer Children Come Unto Me (in Ottawa). There's another version of this study, without the hands. I'm not sure which came first, but they're both by Van Dyck. It seems there was a demand for studies by him, and sometimes he did replicas.
The former is estimated at $200,00-$300,000, and the boy is estimated at $250,000-$350,000. Both estimates seem to me to be on the cheap side. I'd value the woman looking up at at least $500,000. I bet they do well on the day. But it's one of those curious mid-season sales, outside of the normal Old Master sales in the summer, so you never know.
Also in the sale is the below sketch - en grisaille - of Martin Ryckaert, which is catalogued as 'attributed to Van Dyck'. The estimate is $200,000-$300,000 - too high it seems to me for an attributed work. And for what it's worth - and I should stress I have only seen it via the photo - I'm not entirely sure it's by Van Dyck himself. Here's the original painting in the Prado - probably my favourite Van Dyck. The sketch was probably made for Van Dyck's series of engravings, his Iconografie.
Update - I forgot to note Van Dyck's birthday, two days ago (22nd March). Happy Birthday, Ant!
'hopelessly excessive'
March 15 2015
Picture: Guardian
I got a lot of grief from some in the contemporary art world when I expressed amazement at the prices currently achieved (in the Financial Times) by some artists. So it's interesting to hear similar thoughts from none other than Gerhard Richter, who calls todays prices 'hopelessly excessive'. The Guardian reports:
Gerhard Richter, the world-famous German painter, has expressed his incredulity at the astronomical sums paid for his works, calling the art market “hopelessly excessive” and saying that prices are rarely a reflection on quality.
Richter, 83, told the German daily Die Zeit he had watched the outcome of a recent auction at Sotheby’s in London with horror after an anonymous buyer paid £30.4m (€41m, $46.5m) for his 1986 oil-on-canvas, Abstraktes Bild.
We artists get next to nothing from such an auction. Except for a small morsel, all the profit goes to the seller
“The records keep being broken and every time my initial reaction is one of horror even if it’s actually welcome news. But there is something really shocking about the amount,” Richter said.
He said he believed people who paid so much money for his paintings were foolish and foresaw that prices for his art would crash “when the art market corrects itself”, as he was convinced it would.
Seen as the leader of the New European Painting movement which emerged in the second half of the 20th century, Richter made a name for himself with “photo-paintings” that replicate photographs and are then “blurred” with a squeegee or a brush.
The price paid for Abstraktes Bild amounted to a staggering 5,000-fold increase on the price he had originally sold it for, he said.
He told the weekly newspaper that he understood as much about the art market as he did “about Chinese or physics”, and said contrary to a common perception he hardly benefited at all from such sales.
“We artists get next to nothing from such an auction. Except for a small morsel, all the profit goes to the seller,” he said.
'A really crass, inept painting'
March 9 2015
Picture: Sotheby's
Remember the case of the newly discovered Constable sketch (above), which made $5m at Sotheby's New York after being sold as a copy by Christie's in London for £3,500?
Well the Christie's fightback has begun. At the time of the Sotheby's sale, Christie's put out a statement casting doubt on the attribution, saying:
“We understand that there is no clear consensus of expertise on the new attribution.”
And now they have provided, to the New York Times, the name of a Constable scholar who doubts the attribution. And he doesn't just doubt it, he says the picture is not even close.
The scholar is called Conal Shields, and his Constable resumé is impressive enough - in a letter published online (in relation to another matter) he says:
I was formerly Head of Art History and Conservation at the London Institute and am now co-curator of the Thomson Collection and the Thomson Archive of Art, and fine art advisor to Lord Thomson of Fleet, whose collection of paintings, drawings and prints by John Constable is the largest in private hands.
I have been co-organiser of two Tate Britain exhibitions devoted to John Constable, one of these the official bicentennial celebration, and am presently preparing a Constable exhibition for the Royal Academy, London, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Clark Institute in the U.S.A. I am co-editor of the final volume in the Suffolk Record Society's series of Constable documents and was keynote speaker at the National Gallery of Australia's Constable Symposium. I act as a consultant to both Christies and Sothebys.
But does he have a good Constable 'eye'? I don't know, as I've never met him, and have no means to immediately judge his track record. What is curious, though, is that his reaction to the picture is so viscerally different to that of say, Anne Lyles, the former Tate curator who is recognised as the current pre-eminent Constable scholar. Where Lyles saw a fine sketch by Constable, Shields:
“could see no sign of Constable’s hand in the work [...] It’s a really crass, inept painting.”
So this is not a case of Shields saying 'I'm not sure'. He's saying that Lyles, Sotheby's, and the market in general (I heard of not a single dissenting voice when the picture came up for sale as 'Constable' at Sotheby's) is wrong, massively wrong. For what it's worth (though I claim no Constable expertise at all) I saw the picture twice before it was sold in New York, and I had no doubt it was indeed by Constable.
All this, it would seem, comes in the context of whether Christie's are in danger of being sued by the consignors of the picture when it was sold for £3,500 in London. In the New York Times piece, Lady Hambleden, the named vendor in the Christie's catalogue, says that:
[...] when she first learned the painting was by Constable, “I felt like a fool! I know it’s not my fault, but that was my first feeling.”
But she said she has no intention of suing over a work for which she had little affection and that her mother-in-law had stuffed in a cupboard for 60 years.
“It was sold under my name,” she said, “but on behalf of my children. So it would be their decision whether or not to bring legal action.”
Her sons did not respond to a number of messages seeking comment.
I don't know, but I suspect they're looking into it quite carefully. Remember, the key thing here is negligence, not whether Christie's made a simple mistake; did Christie's make all reasonable efforts to ensure that they looked into the possible Constable attribution? If they showed it to Conal Shields before the sale, and he said 'nah', then they might be in the clear, even if Shields turns out to be wrong. The recent Sotheby's 'Caravaggio' case gives us a good template of how such cases will work, and how hard it is to prove negligence against a major auction house. But it still seems to me that the special weakness in Christie's case is the presence of the £5m Claude in the same minor sale as the Constable, which was only withdrawn at the very last minute.
Incidentally, a reader kindly sent me an interesting quote from an earlier case on attribution heard in a British court, over a putative Van Dyck in 2002. Then, Mr Justice Buckley, in relation to who was qualified to make an attribution, said:
From listening to them both I understood that [the expert ‘eye’] to mean rather more than just observation. Whilst it is vital to have keen observation it is also necessary to have knowledge of an artist’s methods and style and to be sufficiently familiar with his work to be able to recognise his artistic ‘handwriting’. Even that is not all. It involves also a sensitivity to such concepts as quality, emotion, mood and atmosphere. To an extent ‘eye’ can be developed but, like many other human attributes it is partly born in a man or a woman. Were it otherwise there would be many more true experts.
Very true, m'lud.
Update - a reader writes:
It may be the inherent nature of the blog that it is quickly written but assuming that you want your opinion to be taken seriously I would query your claim of 'no Constable expertise at all' and yet have 'no doubt that it is by Constable', whatever Shields says!
Nobody should take me seriously.
Stolen Tiepolo returned
March 2 2015
Picture: New York Times
An important picture by Giabattista Tiepolo (or, 'Mr. Tiepolo' as the New York Times calls him) has been returned to its owners in Italy, having been stolen in 1982. The picture, The Holy Trinity Appearing to Saint Clement, had been consigned to Christie's last year, and was due to be sold with an estimate of $500,000-$700,000 before it was spotted.
According to the FBI website:
After being provided with evidence that the painting was the same piece previously reported stolen in 1982, the Tiepolo’s consignor agreed to its seizure by the FBI and its return to Italy. The United States Attorney’s Office submitted a proposed stipulation and order providing for the Tiepolo’s seizure and return, and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York entered that order on January 23, 2015. Italian authorities continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the theft of the painting, including the circumstances of its importation into the United States.
Nothing here, pace the curious case of the two stolen Wolsey angels (below), about anyone buying the picture 'in good faith', and therefore being due a cut.
Getting the hump
February 19 2015
Picture: Dukes Auctions via Timothy Medhurst on Twitter.
I know this is both vulgar and childish, but I couldn't resist. It's for sale today. Have you ever seen anything like it? Here's the catalogue description:
TWO INDO-PERSIAN MINIATURE STUDIES one showing a tiger hunt 4.5 x 7 ; the other a man mounting a camel 7 x 5 ; 19th / 20th century (2)
Estimate: 100-200
Update - a reader writes:
Crikey that makes 50 Shades look tame!
There is always something new to discover in sleepy old Dorset....
Another writes:
Must be a female camel- did you buy it?
Not quite my thing, alas.
And thanks for all the unprintable camel/desert jokes...
Update II - another reader adds:
Your re-tweet from Timothy Medhurst made me chuckle: it reminded me of one of the cleverest lines I've ever heard in a TV programme.
It was in an episode of Jonathan Creek written by the excellent David Renwick.
"It is easier for a rich man to enter a camel if he stands on a box."
Snigger.
Update III - another sniggering reader writes:
Yes - I bought and sold a small collection of Persian bestial illuminated manuscripts about ten years ago now. The attached image being one example, though it's a bit more graphic than the one you've linked!
Ooph.
