Australian collector Peter Elliott’s estate is beginning to be sold at Mossgreen with a white glove sale of 193 lots that brought in $4.4m Australian dollars mostly concentrated in a few top lots.

Sydney art dealer Denis Savill bought the cover lot, Brett Whiteley’s The Arrival — a glimpse in the Botanical Gardens, for $650,000. He will pay $793,000 including the auction house 22 per cent buyer’s premium, almost double the work’s $400,000 premium.

Savill also competed for Whiteley’s fish-eye style At theBottom of the Park Lavender Bay, paying $610,000 including the premium. He was underbidder on ­Whiteley’s The Blue Garden, which sold for $366,000 including the premium. Savill got Jeffrey Smart’s First Study for the Bus Terminus for its $100,000 reserve (paying $122,000) and competed fiercely for an early Charles Blackman, Girl With Flowers, and will pay $67,000.

Peter Elliott art estate lures big buyers at auction (The Australian)