The art market is preparing for the sale of the Rockefeller estate in 2018. It turns out that Christie’s has another Rockefeller estate coming to market sooner:
This November, Christie’s will offer Property from The Estate of William Kelly Simpson as a highlight of its November 13 Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art. Professor Simpson was an eminent Egyptologist and visionary collector in whose home hung several of the most iconic paintings of the Nabi movement alongside American folk art, European decorative art, Egyptian antiquities and Mughal miniatures. The collection will be sold across Christie’s Antiquities, Art from The Islamic And Indian Worlds, American Art, and Impressionist and Modern Art Evening and Works on Paper Sales. Many of these works were acquired by descent from the estates of Abby Aldrich and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The group is expected to realize in excess of $25 million.
The collection is led by Édouard Vuillard’s superlative Misia et Vallotton from 1899 (estimate: $7-10 million). This painting was purchased by Professor Simpson, and his wife, a granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The subject of this work, Misia Natanson, was the artist’s perennial muse and the object of his unrequited infatuation during the last years of the nineteenth century.
Also highlighting the collection is Plâtre, bouquet de fleurs, 1928, by Henri Matisse (estimate: $1.5-2.5 million). This work was acquired by decent from the collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, co-founder of the museum of modern art in New York. In late 1926 or early 1927, Matisse moved from an apartment in Nice that he had occupied for five years, on the third floor to a space nearly twice the size on the top story of the same address.
