Coverage of the Old Master sales in London earlier this month fixated on the sales from a collector who had worked with Jean Luc Baroni to assemble his collection. At the time, insiders like Bendor Grosvenor were quick to point out that although the collector was unloading some works at a slight loss, his gains on works like the surprise sale of Govaert Flinck’s Old Man at a Casement more than made up for the losses. Besides, the flat sales were more an indication of an insufficient holding period than weakness in the Old Master market.

Now the Art Newspaper reveals the seller of a group of drawings and a Watteau painting to the Getty museum. Turns out, it is the same collector reporters were fixated upon. Getty sale, which Grosvenor points out, belies “the old cliché that museum quality Old Masters never come onto the market anymore is just not true.” Meanwhile, the New York Times speculates the Getty paid a substantial price further putting the recent off-loading at auction in better context.

Here’s The Art Newspaper on who pulled off this feat:

According to sources in the field, the windfall comes from the collection of the 62-year-old collector Luca Padulli, the co-founder of the British investment management company Camomille Associates, who bought the works at auction over the last 17 years, through the British Old Master dealer, Jean-Luc Baroni. […]

While Padulli owns a number of Old Master paintings of the highest quality, including Ludovico Carracci’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, which he bought at Christie’s London in July 2006 for £7.4m (outbidding the Metropolitan Museum of Art), he has recently winnowed down his collection at auction, selling Govaert Flinck’s An Old Man at a Casement at Christie’s New York this April for $10.3m and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s Pagan Sacrifice in the Temple of Jerusalem at Sotheby’s London earlier this month for $632,750. Many observers in the trade believed that the drawings from his collection would soon follow suit.

Who is the collector behind the Getty’s windfall master drawings acquisition? (The Art Newspaper)