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London Old Masters = £107m

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When you put together all of the various sales held this week in London you get a total of approximately £107m. Sotheby’s had £45.5m across all of their sales. Christie’s had £62m with the Jelgersma collection making £25m, the sale to benefit the Rugby School making £14.4m with the bulk of that coming from £11.4m paid for a Lucas van Leyden drawing.

Here’s Christie’s press release on the sales:

On the evening of 6 December, Old Masters at Christie’s realised a combined total of £42,241,000/ $53,730,552/ €47,352,161, selling 65% by lot with registered bidders from 29 countries across 4 continents. The Important Old Master Paintings from The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection: Evening Sale achieved £21,389,250/ $27,207,126, selling 64% by lot; the Old Masters Evening Sale realised £20,851,750/ $26,523,426, selling 67% by lot.

A pair of portraits by Frans Hals Portrait of a gentleman, aged 37 and Portrait of a lady, aged 36, sold for £10,021,250 / $12,747,030 setting a new world record price for the artist at auction (estimate: £8-12 million).

Further highlights include arguably the most important Golden Age painting by a female artist left in private ownership, Merry Company by Judith Leyster, which was sold for £1,808,750/ $2,300,730 (estimate: £1,500,000-2,500,000), setting a new world record price for the artist at auction and selling for almost four times the previous record. The Collection Sale on 7 December was led by a rare Italian architectural model based closely on the Temple of Portunus which sold for £187,500/ $239,250 (estimate: £50,000 – 80,000).

Sotheby’s had this release on their sales:

Sotheby’s London sales concluded with a combined total of £45,566,613 / $58,084,687 / €51,240,012. Strong performances across five sales, including Old Master Paintings, Sculpture and a dedicated sale of portrait miniatures saw exceptional sell-through rates with totals exceeding their pre-sale estimates.

OLD MASTERS PAINTINGS, 5-6 December

  • Together the Old Masters Evening and Day sales totalled £34,563,175 / $44,030,820 / €38,883,625
  • Participants from 22 countries with strong bidding from new and traditional markets, particularly UK
  • 85.7% sell-through rate achieved for the Evening sale – the highest achieved in the category in London, with 45% of lots selling above top estimates
  • 4 auction records achieved in the Evening sale (The Master of the Aachen Altar, The Master of Saint Veronica, Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael (record in sterling) and Erasmus Quellinus the Younger).
  • The Evening sale presented fresh-to-the-market works with almost half of the lots offered having not appeared on the market for over 30 years
  • Private collectors dominated bidding (75% vs. 25% dealer by lot) with two institutional purchases (Evening sale: Lot 6, Day sale: Lot 188)
  • Over 7,250 people visited the pre-sale exhibition over 5 days

Top lots

  • Rare oil sketch by Rembrandt realised £9,480,800 ($12,080,435 / €10,665,921), over its estimate (lot 18, est. £6 – 8 million). Appearing on the market for the first time in 60 years, the touching portrait of Christ until recently hung in the artist’s house in Amsterdam. In preparation for display in the seminal exhibition “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus” at the Louvre, Paris in 2011, the painting underwent extensive cleaning and conservation during which two fingerprints were found, presumably those of the artist himself. 
  • Royal portraits of King Charles I’s two eldest children by Sir Anthony van Dyck, among the last works painted by the artist, made £2,620,000 ($3,338,404) and £790,000 ($1,006,618) respectively (lots 29 and 30, est. £2-3m and £600,000-800,000). Depicting the eleven year-old Prince of Wales (later King Charles II), and his nine year-oldsister Mary (the mother of the future king, William III), the works were painted on the eve of the English Civil War and provide a penetrating likeness of the royal children at a time when their world, and the Stuart monarchy, was on the brink of collapse.

Strong performance for Dutch and Flemish art

Half of the works in the sale were by Dutch and Flemish artists

90% of them sold for a combined a total of £24,685,550 / $31,454,326, well above estimate (est. £16.8 -23.7m)

  • Jacob Isaacksz. van Ruisdael’s A Harleempje: a panoramic view of Haarlem and the bleaching fields seen from the north-west realised £2,650,000 ($3,376,630) (lot 13, est. £1.5 – 2m). Celebrating the artist’s native city of Haarlem, this work established Ruisdael as the leading landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age.
  • One of the finest works by Jan van de Cappelle, A Calm Sea achieved £2,050,000($2,612,110) (lot 15, est. £1-1.5 million).
  • One of Jan Brueghel the Elder’s earliest and most pioneering works, An extensive coastal landscape with fisherman landing and selling their catch, Jonah being cast overboard and offshore, 1595, achieved £1,990,000 ($2,535,658) (lot 11, est. £1.8 – 2.5m).
  • Aert van der Neer’s Winter landscape with kolf players realised £1,210,000(1,541,782) (lot 38, est. £1-1.5m). The artist’s winter landscapes are by far his most prized and sought-after paintings
  • A Winter landscape by Pieter Brueghel the Younger sold for £970,000 ($1,235,974) (lot 27, est. £700,000 – 900,000).
  • A stunning depiction of Mary Magdalene reading by Ambrosius Benson rose to £730,000 ($930,166) (lot 1, est. £200,000-300,000)

Further highlights from the sale

  • A beautiful and intensely personal triptych attributed to the Master of Saint Veronica, circa 1410 realised £1,570,000 ($2,000,494) (lot 6, est. £1.2-1.8m).
  • The arresting and refined depiction of Christ by a close associate of Leonardo da Vinci in around 1510, soared to £874,000 ($1,113,651) (lot 4, est. £250,000 – 350,000).

Albada Jelgersma Collection ‘A Seminal Moment’ for Old Master Market, Says Christie’s

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In what Christie’s is calling a “seminal moment for the Old Master market,” the December sales of Old Master paintings in London will feature two sales comprising the collection of Eric Albada Jelgersma and his wife, Marie-Louise. The Albada Jelgersma paintings will get their own Evening sale. The rest of the collection of furniture, drawings, silver and the like will fill a a 350-lot day sale. These sales will take place December 6 & 7. The Evening sale will feature a pair of Frans Hals portraits, above, estimated at between £8-12m, and works by Judith Leyster and Anthony van Dyck.

Here’s Christie’s release:

Christie’s will offer a landmark, two-part sale of The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection in London on 6 & 7 December. This is one of the most important private collections of Golden Age Dutch and Flemish pictures to have been formed in living memory, revealing the unerring eye of Eric Albada Jelgersma and his wife Marie-Louise Albada Jelgersma for outstanding quality.

Christie’s will devote a special, stand-alone Old Masters Evening Sale to The Eric Albada Jelgersma Collection comprising over 40 paintings, including works by the greatest artists from the 17th century, notably Frans Hals, Anthony van Dyck, Jan Breughel the Elder, Judith Leyster and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder.

This sale is led by the finest pair of portraits by Frans Hals to remain together in private hands: Portrait of a gentleman, aged 37 and Portrait of a lady, aged 36 (estimate: £8-12 million) and includes arguably the most important Golden Age painting by a female artist left in private ownership, Merry Company by Judith Leyster (estimate: £1.5-2.5 million).

The Collection Sale will take place the following day and will comprise over 350 lots of furniture, decorative objects, sculpture, antiquities, silver, Asian works of art and a selection of the Old Master paintings. The quality and range of the Old Master paintings and works of art within the collection is extraordinary, and their appearance together at auction will constitute an historic pair of sales. Highlights will be on public view at Christie’s New York from 26 to 30 October and in Hong Kong from 23 to 26 November, ahead of the pre-sale exhibition opening in London on 30 November.

Action in the Old Masters Market in Unlikely Places 

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  • “It was a great sale. There’s life out there”, says New York dealer Robert Simon
  • As Munich dealer Martin Graessle sums it up: “It is easier today to sell a work for $1m than one for $10,000.”
  • Some prices, particularly for drawings, reached impressive levels.
  • “We had really deep interest from all over the world. That was not always the case in recent years”, says Christopher Apostle, the head of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department. “Also, we had new bidders and younger bidders”.

The reactions to last week’s sale of Old Masters works primarily at Sotheby’s recorded by Barbara Kutscher in The Art Newspaper were hopeful. Buyers seemed to pursue works in unexpected places, especially in the drawings market where Christie’s also held a sale. As Kutscher points out, the collection of Howard and Saretta Barnet reached $16.8m, in part because of the strong participation of collectors:

The top lot—an extremely rare, heavily inked drawing of a landscape around Shoreham, Kent, by Samuel Palmer (around 1831)—was claimed by a New York collector, briefly challenged by the London dealer Stephen Ongpin, for a high $2m, or $2.4m with fees. The same buyer also won fiercely contested graphite and pencil drawings by Ingrès and Picasso. An exquisite brush drawing by Goya, showing an old woman hunched over a basket full of eggs, will make its way into a European private collection for $2.1m.

Colin Gleadell thinks the collector mentioned here is Leon Black.

That strong performance contributed to the overall total of $82.5m which was twice the total of the previous year which came in at $41.9m. Here are some of the strong performances from Sotheby’s various sales:Continue Reading

Seemingly Strong Old Master Sales Offer Mixed Interpretations

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The full narrative of the Old Master sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. You are welcome to cancel your subscription before the end of the month and pay no fee.

There was a wide variety of reactions to the Old Master sales last week in London. Some saw the sales as a triumph of flashy cross marketing. Others saw the inherent value of the category asserting itself over time. It is clear that tastes are changing in the category. But the overall total of £118m with Sotheby's Evening sale achieving an 85% sell-through rate suggests the Old Master category is anything but left for dead.

Perhaps more to the point, the current structure of the art market where third-party guarantees stabilize prices, there's good reason to believe that pricing in the Old Master market has become fairly stable and predictable with some caveats surrounding holding times.

On the positive side, the major lots, a J.M.W. Turner German scene and a Guardi Venetian view, both sold within the reference points of recent, related sales. For the Guardi, the picture sold for pretty much the same price as its pendant which was sold six years ago. This is Bendor Grosvenor's point:

the Guardi ('The Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi') saw much stiffer competition than the Turner, with bidding starting at £12m before hammering at £23.25m (£26.2m with premium). This price compares favourably to the value of the picture's 'pendant', View of the Rialto Bridge, from the Fondamenta del Carbon, which had sold at Sotheby's in 2011 for £26.7m (inc premium).

You can contrast that with The New York Times's Scott Reyburn who seems to have been entranced by a video Christie's made of the painting in situ. According to Reyburn's view, the key to selling Old Master works these days is to market them to Contemporary collectors who are used to paying more:

The Christie’s video was filmed during the opening days of the Venice Biennale, as that city hosted hundreds of wealthy contemporary art collectors. This kind of global marketing, along with the low estimate of £25 million, helped persuade the owner of Guardi’s 6 feet 8 inches wide canvas “Venice: the Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi” to sell.

Except, it turns out the the £25m estimate wasn't attractively low at all. It was pretty much priced by the previous sale of the painting's pendant:

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The ‘Aesthetic of the Unfinished’ Pushes Rubens to Top of OM Paintings and Drawings Week in NYC

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Sarah P. Hanson has an excellent recap of this week’s Old Masters auctions and dealer exhibitions of drawings. She points out that David Tunick’s show of Gustav Klimt drawings that, she says, have not been seen for 37 years scored a sale to a new client who fell for a portrait of a woman done in blue pencil.

On the auction side, Hanson explains that Christie’s new drawing team was able to nearly double the dollar volume of their sale from $3.2m to $6.2m with nearly the same number of lots. That’s either an impressive commentary on the team or the market or both.

Hanson also points out that the top lot was Rubens study that had been re-attributed and cleaned to show the “sketchy oil on canvas, evidence of Rubens’s famously quick hand.” Considering the popularity of unfinished works in both the Met’s recent show and Otto Naumann’s TEFAF sales, Sotheby’s was touting in its catalogue the ‘aesthetic of the unfinished.’ It seemed to work—mostly.

Here’s Hanson’s take:Continue Reading

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