Category: Auctions
Who will save this 'Handsome Gent'?
July 12 2012
Picture: Leighton Galleries
Van Dyck would have loved the cataloguing of this picture - 'Portrait of a Handsome Gent' - but perhaps not the fact that he was mis-identified, and nor that he was on offer for just $100.
A sleeper's long journey
July 9 2012
Picture: Christie's
A picture that did well last week was a portrait at Christie's of Henry Jermyn, an important courtier before and after the Civil War. It was being offered as Studio of 'Van Dyck', with an estimate of £60,000-£80,000. The picture was quite substantially damaged, especially in the hair and areas of the face. But overall it was a nice picture, of an important sitter. I thought that the head was almost certainly by Van Dyck, with perhaps some studio assistance in the drapery. It seemed that there might be some later oil over-paint in the hair. It is probable that the painting is a second portrait by Van Dyck of Jermyn, for there seems to have once been a full-length.
The picture has been sold at auction three times in the last two years. It first surfaced at a regional auctioneer in England in 2010, making £16,000 hammer when called 'Studio (or Follower) of Van Dyck'. Then it was sold at the Dorotheum in Vienna as 'Van Dyck' in full, making EUR 76,230. And last week it made £163,250 (inc. premium).
Chasing Leonardo
July 9 2012
Picture: Christie's
There was an astonishing price at Christie's last week for the above painting, catalogued as 'Follower of Leonardo'. Estimated at £50-£70,000, it made £937,250 (inc. premium). I thought the picture was rather ordinary, and not half as good as the version in the Hermitage, which is thought to be by one of Leonardo's pupils, Francesco Melzo. But the Christie's catalogue entry was temptingly written, and evidently more than one person thought the picture was better than many believed. Would this price have been achieved before the recent Leonardo show? Possibly not.
The Saenredam seesaw
July 6 2012
Picture: BG
I was pleased, but not surprised, to see that the Saenredam View of Assendelft made a huge £3.7m at Christie's on Tuesday. This was the same picture that had nearly sold as a sleeper at Christie's South Kensington, with an estimate of £3-5,000. To their credit, Christie's mentioned the South Kensington near-miss in their catalogue, but couched it by adding that they weren't the first people to misattribute the painting. Alas, there was no mention of Art History News' role in the picture's re-attribution.
Meanwhile, a Saenredam of a church interior which sold at Sotheby's New York in 2004 for $1.85m made just £713,250 this time round.
Bargain of the Week?
July 6 2012
Picture: Sotheby's
I know my fascination with Van Dyck means I'm a little biased, but I thought one of the steals of the auctions this week was the above full-scale replica of Van Dyck's portrait of the Stuart Brothers [National Gallery, London]. Catalogued as 'After Van Dyck', it is by Charles Jervas, one of Van Dyck's successors as Court artist. Like me, Jervas was slightly obsessed with Van Dyck, and regularly made copies of his works. This one appears in Jervas' posthumous sale. It sold at Sotheby's for just £11,250.
Constable's 'Lock' - will it sell?
July 3 2012
Picture: BG
All eyes on Christie's this evening, to see if another record will be set for a British painter. So far, the omens for Constable's The Lock are good - there was lots of interest at the viewing from telly and the like. The picture is already guaranteed. The question is, will it sell to the guarantor, or will other bidders come forward? I hope so. But my hunch is they won't.
Constable 'sells for £22.4m'
July 3 2012
Picture: BG
Good news that Christie's set another record price for a British painting. There were lots of TV cameras at the sale (above). The price matches the record for Stubbs' Gimcrack. Now this may or may not be a coincidence, for both pictures were estimated at £20m-£25m, and both were guaranteed before the sale by an undisclosed third party. A bid at the lower estimate of £20m plus buyer's premium comes to £22.4m. The Stubbs sold to the guarantor - so in that case it is almost certain that the price the buyer actually ended up paying was not in fact £22.4m (to find out how the system works, click here).
So has the same happened tonight with the Constable? Who knows. I suspect it has (and it should be noted that before the sale the auctioneer announced that the guarantor would indeed be bidding on the painting, and would recieve a 'funding fee' for doing so - for which read, 'a discount'). Obviously, if the guarantor is the buyer of the Constable, then treat those 'Constable sells for £22.4m' headlines with caution. And ask yourself whether, if Christie's was a bank and the prices that pictures realised were as crucial as, say, setting the Libor rate, people might be slightly puzzled by all this.
Update: Christie's have confirmed that the guarantor was indeed the buyer.
Records at Christie's
July 1 2012
Video: Christie's
Coming to this a little late I'm afraid, but worth noting that Christie's recent post-war and contemporary evening sale made £132.8m, a record for any european auction house. One of the top lots was Francis Bacon's Study for Self-Portrait (above), which made £21.5m. Prices include buyer's premium. More details, including Sotheby's results, in The New York Times.
Guido Reni's 'David & Goliath'
June 25 2012
Video: Sotheby's
Sotheby's head of Old Masters, Christopher Apostle, talks about Guido Reni's David & Goliath, coming up for sale in London on 4th July. The estimate is £3m-5m.
Update - a reader alerts me to the fact that it previously failed to sell in 1992, and fetched the enormous price of £2.2m in 1985. It'll be interesting to see what it makes this time. Does the relative lack of uplift since the '80s suggest that Italian 17th C religious works will always be rather unfashionable? It makes a useful comparison with Constable's The Lock, which sold for £10.8m in 1990, and is now guaranteed with an estimate of £20m-£25m.
A Frith found, and a Frith lost
June 20 2012
Picture: Guardian
Funny how these things come at once - in the same week an exhibition highlights a long lost work by William Powell Frith (of Kate Nickleby, painted for Charles Dickens and seen in the engraving above), an auction house, Boningtons in Essex, finds a newly discovered work by the artist (The Rejected Poet, below).
New Miro record
June 20 2012
Picture: BBC
Joan Miro's Peinture (Etoile Bleue) sold at Sotheby's in London last night for £23.5m, three times what it made when sold in Paris in 2007. The Impressionist and Modern Art sale made £75m in total. More details here.
Guffwatch - how they do it
June 18 2012
This is invaluable - a former intern at Sotheby's, Alice Gregory, lifts the lid on those impenetrable contemporary catalogue entries:
After a few months on the job, I was assigned a new duty—writing the essays that are printed beneath and between the reproduced images in the sale catalogue. [...] The essay copy is mostly a formality, but it plays a role in the auction house’s overall marketing strategy. The more text given to an individual piece, the more the house seems to value it. I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (“fey,” “gestural,” “restrained”) amid a small repertory of active verbs (“explore,” “trace,” “question” ). I inserted the phrases “negative space,” “balanced composition,” and “challenges the viewer” every so often. X’s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary—which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light—ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades. I described impasto—paint thickly applied to a canvas, often with a palette knife—almost pornographically and joked with friends on Gchat that I was being paid to write pulp. Pulp was exactly what I was writing. It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise. In most ways, the auction house is unshackled from intellectual pretense by its pure attention to the marketplace. Through its catalogue copy (and for a time, through me), it makes one small concession to the art world’s native tongue.
The £670,000 Greek fake at Sotheby's?
June 15 2012
Picture: Artinfo/Sotheby's
Readers may remember the case of a Greek art collector suing Sotheby's for selling him not one but two alleged fakes. Now, Artinfo reports a court has found against Sotheby's with regard to one of the pictures, the above 'Virgin and Child' (above) sold as by Constantinos Parthenis for £670,000, and has orderd the auctioneers to pay Diamantis Diamantides £950,000 in damages. Sotheby's are appealing against the decision, and say:
"It stands to reason that an auction house which sells art worth billions of dollars per year and relies on its reputation to secure consignments and purchasers would not put its business at risk by knowingly selling forged works."
This is a cut and paste response from their previous denials of the case. At the same time, the market for Greek art has fallen through the floor. Pictures are struggling to sell for a fraction of what they did before the 2008 crash. So, paradoxically, Mr Diamantides' pictures are worth more as fakes (if he can indeed force Sotheby's to repay him his money) than they are as the real thing.
A Hirst sales pitch
June 12 2012
Video: Sotheby's
Unintentionally, the Sotheby's expert offering multi-million pound Hirsts hits the nail on the head:
'What fascinates Damien so much is the blind credence we human beings have...'
Update - a reader writes:
[It's] the art equivalent of your dad dancing to Coldplay.
Another reader takes me to task for preferring the Christie's Rembrandt video over Sotheby's Hirst one:
With reference to the promotional filmettes of the Rembrandt and the Hirst, you are letting your views on the artists influence your views on the films themselves. Whatever you think of the works of art behind talked about, the piece about the Hirst is actually very sober in the words it uses, while the Rembrandt video uses the words genius, iconic, virtuosity, seminal and astonishing all within the space of a few seconds. Just what we art historians were taught not to do. Knowledgable? He's reading from a script. Understated? It's all sales talk, with a bit of art history-lite thrown in. And you took that quote about blind credence totally out of context.
I am not trying to defend Damien Hirst, only to keep you on your toes!
Personally, I think the key difference here is that Rembrandt's art deserves to be described with the words 'seminal' and 'iconic', whereas Hirst's does not (yet). And I think it's a shame that art historians are (or rather were) taught not be enthusiastic about their subjects by using words like 'genius' and 'iconic'. If you like something, say it.
Another reader also pulls me up on the quote above from the Hirst video:
I think very selective quotes are usually a bad idea, speaking as a former lawyer, so was a bit surprised to see the Hirst one.
The quote from the video may have been judiciously selected, but if I may plead in defence, I did preface its selection by writing that the Sotheby's expert was expressing a view 'unintentionally'. I think one can make a case that Hirst is interested in society's 'blind credence' on a number of levels, not least in its capacity to believe in the value of his art. On which point, let me remind readers that I hold a secret admiration for Hirst himself; it's just the associated guff people in the art world attach to him that grates.
Things you shouldn't use as a coaster
June 8 2012
Picture: Christie's
Top of the list - drawings by Rembrandt. This slightly soiled example is yours for £50,000-£80,000 at Christie's next month. Of course, if it could be proved to have been Rembrandt's own coaster, then add a nought!
Update - it might indeed by Rembrandt's coaster (of sorts), for Christie's write:
The circular stain is an iron-gall ink stain, probably from the base of an ink-pot, so (while we can never know for sure) there is certainly a chance that the stain could be from the artist’s studio.
Christie's $12m vs Sotheby's $5m
June 8 2012
Picture: Sotheby's
Sotheby's New York Old Master sale last night made a total of $5.2m (with preimum), less than half Christie's total of $12.5m earlier in the week. The top lot was a curious 14th C Madonna by the Pseudo Dalmasio Degli Scannabecchi (above), which sold for $794,500. The Guido Reni fragment I mentioned previously made $122,500.
$4.5m restitution windfall
June 7 2012
Video: Christie's
A Christ Carrying the Cross by Girolamo Romanino, which was dramatically seized from a museum wall just last year, has been sold for $4.5m by the heirs of the family who were forced to sell it during the Nazi era. The picture (featured above in a superalitive-laden video by Christie's) was the top lot in Christie's New York Old Master sale last night, which made in total $12.5m. Other noteworthy lots included a Portrait of Francois Langlois by the Studio of Van Dyck, which made $338,500 against an estimate of $80,000-$120,000, and a 'newly discovered Rubens' of Frederico Gonzaga, which failed to sell (for the second time) at $500,000-700,000.
Andrew Wyld sale at Christie's
May 31 2012
Picture: Philip Mould/W/S Fine Art & Christie's
The auction catalogue for the sale of the late Andrew Wyld, one of the finest art dealers of his generation, has gone online. Andrew's gallery was just next to ours in Dover St, and while I can't say I ever knew him well, he was always a friendly face, a trove of knowledge, and above all a great connoisseur. It's nice to see that the Christie's sale is called 'Andrew Wyld: Connoisseur Dealer', for despite what some believe, the two disciplines go well together. Andrew had a good take on connoisseurship, which I use in my lectures on the subject:
“Academic study can lead to a closed mind. There is a world of difference between looking at thousands of photographs of works of art, with occasional visits to museums, and spending time in the saleroom looking at the real thing. Most of the things that one sees are not very good, but it trains the eye better to learn that way."
Lot 28 in the sale is a drawing by Romney of the Rev. William Atkinson. I reported on the curious coincidence behind this drawing some time ago. But to recap briefly, we found mis-catalogued at auction a portrait of the Rev. William Atkinson by George Romney (above left) and hung it in our window. Andrew had at the same time acquired a drawing by Romney (above right) of the same sitter in a hat - but didn't know who his sitter was until he walked past our window on his way home one night. It's a nice example of how the trade can advance art history. So too is lot 91 in the Christie's sale, a study of clouds by John Constable, which Andrew found in a minor country sale.
Who will buy the Constable?
May 30 2012
Picture: Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
A reader writes:
Maybe the Getty, since they finally got their hands on Turner's Modern Rome last year? And they have been spending vast amounts of cash on acquisitions of late.
Modern Rome was their second painting by Turner of course, the other being the ex-Holloway College Van Tromp; and they have two watercolours. But nothing by Constable as yet so this is their only opportunity to get a really important one. I doubt somehow that his last great six-footer, still in private hands, would be allowed out of the country.
Meanwhile, my cunning plan to solve Spain's banking crisis by buying back Holbein's Henry VIII is scotched by a Spanish reader:
Fortunately, the portrait of Henry VIII is owned by the Spanish State, and like all works of art from national museums,is inalienable, in contrast to Constable's 'Lock' which is owned by the Baroness and only was on loan to the Thyssen museum with the rest of the Carmen Thyssen collection, but the collection of her husband, With Van Eyck, Duccio, Caravaggio, Carpaccio, Weyden, Bacon, etc is owned by the Spanish.
On the block - Constable's 'Lock' *
May 29 2012
Picture: Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
Constable's 'The Lock' is to be sold by Christie's this July in London. The estimate is £20m-25m. From The Guardian:
The auction house said it was to sell the only one of Constable's Stour series - which includes The Hay Wain in the National Gallery - that remains in private hands.
Jussi Pylkkänen, president of Christie's Europe, said The Lock was "one of John Constable's greatest paintings and an outstanding masterpiece of British art". He added: "This superb landscape, coming from the same series as The Hay Wain, represents British landscape painting at its very best and is sure to attract bidding from museums and collectors from all over the world."
UK museums are unlikely to have deep enough pockets for a work that, when it was bought at auction in 1990, set a record for a British work of art. It was bought for £10.8m and held the record until 2006 when a view of Venice by Turner, Constable's rival, sold for £20.5m at Christie's in New York. Another Turner sold for £29m at Sotheby's in London in 2010.
Who will buy it? Who knows. Can a British museum afford it? Perhaps the Heritage Lottery Fund's recent decision to give a whole chunk of cash towards the Ashmolean's Manet is indicative of a new willingness to help with acquisitions. But don't hold your breath...
The sale is likely to be controversial in Spain. The picture used to hang in the Thyssen museum, but is being sold by the widow of the late Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, a former Miss Spain. There was a row about it last year, with the Baron's daughter calling her stepmother 'isolated from reality', and blocking the sale of any pictures from the museum. But then again, perhaps the people of Spain won't miss a Constable that much. And who knows, if the selling thing catches on, we may even be able to buy back one of our greatest lost treasures, Holbein's Portrait of Henry VIII, which was sold by one of the Earls Spencer in 1934. Now that would make a dent in the Spanish deficit.
* I know that's a really lame rhyming headline.
