A Look at Old Master Sales in London

The London Telegraph has a recap of the recent London Old Master sales.  The article notes sales of Old Master paintings was rather tepid at the Frieze Masters Fair in October, but renewed interest from Russian and  Asian collectors seems to have sparked the sector.  Three Old Master sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Bonhams were estimated to sell between $84.2 million and $121 million. The sales, impressively sold over the high estimate at $124 million including buyers premiums.

The Telegraph reports on the sales

After a fairly dismal performance at the Frieze Masters fair in October, where few Old Masters paintings were sold, the Old Master market picked up its heels at the London auctions last week. Two sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s and one at Bonhams, which were estimated to fetch between £53.6 million and £77 million between them, exceeded the upper estimate at £79 million – not a record, but impressive none the less.

The star lot of the week was J.M.W. Turner’s oil, Rome from Mount Aventine from the Earl of Rosebery’s collection, which became the second most expensive Old Master ever at auction, after Rubens’s £49.5 million Massacre of the Innocents, selling above the £15 million estimate for £30.3 million at Sotheby’s. The gossip columns had some fun with this because the heir to the Rosebery title, Harry Dalmeny, is a director of Sotheby’s and is facing a costly divorce. But of course that has no bearing on the quality of the painting or the price paid. Equally, the release of Mike Leigh’s excellent film, Mr Turner, is not likely to have affected the result.

The previous Turner record was £29.7 million for another view of Rome from the Rosebery collection that sold to the J Paul Getty Museum in 2010, and the former Getty curator, Scott Schaefer, who now works for Sotheby’s, was one of the unsuccessful bidders last week. A popular guess on the identity of the anonymous phone buyer was Leon Black, the American businessman who spent $120 million on Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and £29 million on Raphael’s drawing, Head of a Young Apostle.

Other records of note at Sotheby’s were achieved by a hitherto unrecorded and mischievously decadent painting, The Prodigal Son, by Jan Cossiers, which sold far above its £100,000 estimate to a Russian buyer for £662,500; a dramatic, early romantic flooded dam scene by Jan Asselijn which doubled its estimate to sell to Paris dealer, Bob Haboldt, for £602,500; and a hypnotic still life, Three peaches on a stone ledge by Adriaen Coorte, which sold for £3.4 million to a private European phone bidder. The Coorte was last auctioned at Bonhams in 2011 when it sold to dealer William Noortman for a record £2 million, so has advanced considerably in the short interval.

The best long-term return of the evening was a classic Pieter Brueghel the Younger painting of villagers dancing which had been acquired by the German seller in 1978 for 1 million Deutchmarks and sold for £2.6 million to dealer Johnny van Haeften. How many contemporary works will fetch 10 times their cost today in 36 years time, one wonders.

A lower key sale at Christie’s made less than half the price of the Turner at Sotheby’s, but did find buyers for a healthy 75 percent of lots. Top price was £2.9 million for a sensitive portrait of the composer, Hendrick Liberti, by van Dyck. Dealers thought the buyer was probably British businessman, James Stunt, the son-in-law of Bernie Ecclestone.

Stunt recently tried to export a £12.5 million self-portrait by van Dyck to his home in America, but when the export license was stopped temporarily, he nobly stepped aside in the face of popular demand to allow the National Portrait Gallery to acquire it for £10 million.

The most notable record here was the £866,500 given by a Russian phone bidder for Hendrick Bloemaert’s An Allegory of Winter against a £300,000 estimate. Other Russian buys, demonstrating the polarities of taste amongst collectors there, were religious paintings, and a pink-fleshed Venus and Cupid by Francois Boucher.

Perhaps the liveliest bidding at Christie’s came for a pair of handsome 18th-century British portraits of George Craster and his wife, Olive, that were being sold separately by a descendant of the sitters.

Craster, painted by Pompeo Batoni in his Grenadier Guards uniform, was sought after by several London dealers and tripled estimates to sell to dealer Fabrizio Moretti for £344,500, while his wife, painted in more subdued tones by Nathaniel Dance, sold to a phone bidder against Moretti far above the £30,000 estimate for £158,500.

It was a mixed night for the Brueghel family as two of the more highly valued paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Jan Breughel the Elder, both works that had been on the market recently, went unsold. However, the top Brueghel of the sale, Pieter the Younger’s Rubensian A Country Brawl, sold to a Chinese buyer for £842,500 against a £700,000 estimate.

Asian and Russian collectors are now major forces in the Brueghel market and their presence confirms that, while dependent on an erratic supply of masterpieces, the Old Master market is being recharged with new sources of demand.

Source: The Telegraph