Old Master Week in London

Although the contemporary and post war sales have just concluded in London, along with the Masterpiece show, it is now time to shift gears and centuries and look at Old Master week in London. Colin Gleadell writing in his Art Market News in the London Telegraph has a good preview. In addition to the auctions are several good exhibitions and fairs featuring and taking advantage of the influx of old master collectors to London.

I will post results as they become available.

Gleadell writes

Old Master buyers from around the world congregate in London this week when £120 million of paintings and drawings, including a £12million Turner and an £8 million Rubens from Althorp, go under the hammer. But 46 dealers in the capital are using this as an opportunity to attract potential buyers to their doors by mounting special exhibitions for Master paintings and drawings. Colnaghi’s, for instance, is celebrating 250 years in business; Robilant + Voena presents an ambitious show of Italian and French painting entitled A History of Taste; and Clovis Whitfield has put together Carravagio’s Friends & Foes in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death.

Perhaps the show- stopper in the galleries is a densely populated, 7ft-wide Flemish allegorical painting, Man Having to Choose between the Virtues and Vices painted in the 1630s for the City of Antwerp by Frans Francken 11 (above). An acknowledged masterpiece, it was lost to scholars until it surfaced at an auction in Vienna in April estimated at a modest 400,000 to 500,000 euros. London dealer Johnny van Haeften bought it over the telephone for £6.3 million. Having squeezed it through the enlarged front door of his St James’s gallery, where museum directors have been queuing up to inspect it, he is now asking £9.5 million for it.

To read the full article, click HERE.