A review of the December Old Master Sales in London

Posted on January 17, 2023January 15, 2025 by David Dallas

December is an exciting month, not just because Christmas is coming, it is also the last hurrah for the Old Master Painting season in London. Sotheby’s had the better pictures and therefore, the better of the results. Their Day Sale (lesser fry) at a total of £3.34M was roughly three times the value of Christie’s at £1.185M. Furthermore, Christie’s had a large total of lots unsold on the day, 40 out of 104 lots.

The Evening Sale (the top lots) followed a similar pattern with Sotheby’s sale to talling £32.72M, with Christie’s coming in at a more modest £13.14M. In fact, Sotheby’s top lot, Titian’s ‘Venus and Adonis’, at £11.1M made almost as much, on its own, as Christie’s whole sale.

They had a beautiful still life by the Haarlem painter Floris van Dijck, very similar in composition to the painting in the Rijksmuseum and one of my favourite pictures in that collection. This made £2.09M against a pre-sale estimate of £600,000-£800,000.

Also estimated at £600,000 – £800,000 was a dramatic seascape by Ivan Konstantinov Aivazovsky titled ‘The Wrath of the Seas’. I was particularly interested to see what happened to this painting, by a 19th Century Russian artist, bearing in mind what is going on in Ukraine. On the day it made a very healthy £1.729M, proving that Aivazovsky has an international reputation and is not just for local consumption!

During the view at Christie’s, I was intrigued to speculate what would happen to two portraits, in particular. The first was a portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII and the second was, to my mind, a very beautiful portrait of Henrietta Maria, by Sir Anthony van Dyck, court painter to Charles I.

In the event, they both disappointed with the Holbein making £1.12M against an estimate of £1-1.5M and the Van Dyck limping away at £2.44M against an estimate of £2-4M. The highest price was £2.92M (estimate £2-3M) for ‘Reading Party’ by the French Rococo artist Jean Francois de Troy.

These sales told us nothing new about taste for Old Masters, but they did reinforce what I said in July and that is that there is keen interest in paintings by good hands, fresh to the market and in good state. Selling lesser things, which have been seen before, is a struggle.

How Art Galleries & Auction Houses Have Adapted During COVID

Posted on April 12, 2021March 17, 2025 by Jonathan Horwich

‘Never waste a crisis’ they say in the art business. The various lockdowns, and Covid itself, has forced the art market to adapt quickly to the new challenges we all face in our lives and businesses. When you think of the art business, it’s about people and face to face meetings, parties and major auction gala openings etc. So how, in the face of the pandemic, are they going to manage, when indeed the very people they need to see and sell to are no longer allowed to travel or even mingle in any way shape or form!

Brilliantly and swiftly auction houses reacted almost overnight. Having worked in the auction industry myself for over 30 years, I’m well aware of how many great ideas were sitting on the shelves in auction houses just waiting for the right moment to be put into practice, now suddenly, that ‘right moment’ is now and all the ideas are in play. Realising that it would now be impossible for people to view in person, they switched to remote live and timed online auctions. The latter, prior to Covid, had only been mildly successful, but now, with no other option and with bidders locked up at home, they found tens of thousands of new bidders. We were about to witness the reality of presenting auctions live to the public- with nobody at all sitting in the saleroom! Those of you who have attended auctions will recognise the buzzing atmosphere with people here, there and everywhere all bidding and crammed shoulder to shoulder. Well, none of that was going to be possible now.

Christie’s mounted what they called a ‘global auction’ which was an extraordinary feat of logistics and engineering. There was an auctioneer in Hong Kong passing on to the auctioneer in Paris, passing on to an auctioneer in New York, so literally back-to-back auctions spanning almost 15 hours! What was truly remarkable was the numbers. Over 160,000 people were either watching or bidding around the world, whereas normally they might expect 30,000 online viewers and the prices achieved were every bit as strong. In some cases, even stronger than pre-pandemic, mainly because new people were involved so bidder numbers were significantly higher than would have been seen before. In fact, there were so many people attempting to log on to watch, me included, that it was impossible for the system to cope! They reacted quickly though and adapted things. So much so that one year on 160,000 + people watching an auction in various locations around the world is normal and they no longer run out of bandwidth.

To further develop the online offering, new visual aids have appeared. You can now gauge the size of the picture you were thinking about buying on a virtual wall. To be able to gauge the size of the piece is genius, as sometimes in our heads it’s bigger or smaller than it really is.

Auctioneers around the world are still adapting to the new norm. However, not all of them are doing auctions in exactly the same way, which is rather refreshing. Some are conducting live auctions with an auctioneer, sometimes in his own living room, with images and bidding increments being presented on your screen so everything is there for you, while the actual pieces are safely in the warehouse.

Condition reports for multi million dollar lots are essential so that at a distance you can be comfortable with what you’re buying, Covid rules allow for independent restorers to visit the rooms to do reports on behalf of the vendors and are flat out doing just that!

We’re only a year on, however it seems like five years’ worth of ideas and development have been squeezed into less than a year of real time when it comes to auctions. You can now bid on either a live auction in one session with an auctioneer and nobody except staff in the room, or on a timed online auction which is spread over a week or so. Everyone is doing it in their own slightly differing ways and yet all are instinctively seeming to get it right.

Major auctions now appear on YouTube so you can search Christie’s auction and watch a recorded New York auction from beginning to end, followed by a second session in London if you have the energy! The 160,000 people worldwide watching in 2020 has now grown to nearer a million in some cases with auction houses using multiple cameras and angles just like a football match.
For art dealers, international art fairs are the lifeblood to their businesses as it’s where they meet new clients, re-engage with existing clients and show exciting new pieces and discoveries for the first time. The buzz of fairs, such as Masterpiece, the London Art Fair and the Armoury and Frieze fairs are all suspended. The galleries are no longer able to use their physical shop space to garner interest, so to reach out they are turning increasingly to newsletters, updates and new stock reports, knowing that we’re all locked down so much more likely to read what they are sending us. While it’s not possible to go into the galleries themselves, new virtual portals have opened, run by those dealers usually involved with art fairs. This allows them to showcase on other platforms such as Love Antiques, The Bruno Effect and 1st dibs and 2covet – all of whom are benefitting from added interest in this lockdown world.

It’s fair to say that pretty much everything is virtual in the art world now. The upshot I think is that for many people buying at auction and galleries has been totally demystified so encouraging new buyers. When lockdown ends and we get back to something near normal, I think that the art world will bounce back with a vengeance. People will still want to buy at auctions but will accept and enjoy attending virtually too, and there will be an equal number of people who have been introduced to buying art via virtual fairs and exhibitions.

Virtual Auctions

Live auction at Christie’s London on March 1st 2021, here we see the hammer about to come down on the only wartime painting completed by Winston Churchill ‘ called the Tower of the Koutoubia Mosque. it was completed by Churchill in 1943 after the allied conference in Morocco and given to President Franklin D Roosevelt and much later bought by Brad Pitt for his then wife Angelina Joli and sold in this auction on her behalf for nearly 6 times its pre-sale estimate of £1.5 million for a record breaking £8.3 million. The auctioneer is the only one not wearing a mask, see below

Staff bidders at the March 1st auction, not black tie anymore for gala auctions, it’s now matching black masks for everyone. You can’t see but there are no members of the public in the saleroom at all, they are either on these phones or online, only these masked phone bidding staff , the auctioneer plus a few masked art handlers showing the works are the only people in the room. The room would normally be packed yet despite everything this sale and all the others have been rip roaring successes. The sale was filmed using multiple cameras and angles and is therefore fun to watch it is on you tube, just search Christie’s auction where it can be viewed in full, on the night the auction was viewed by over 100,000 people. It appears that watching auctions under lockdown has gone viral !

A rare early picture by Vincent van Gogh, Rue Montmatre , estimate £5-8 million for sale at Sothebys on March 25th 2021 ,this is the image from the online catalogue, it has a ‘zoom in’ facility and condition report, lot essay etc see below

Same Van Gogh picture shown on a virtual wall, next to a virtual window, to give you a sense of its scale

Arg-Ala by Damien Hirst,
Estimate £150-200,000
In a Sothebys online timed auction 26th March, 2021, bidding is over a week usually and progress is shown 24/7 like e bay, bidding ends at a specific time and day with a delay if bidding is still active and will continue until bidding stops , at the time of writing it was £150,000, the picture is 50 x 50 cms and is seen here with an art handler nearby to give scale. These online timed sales were mainly used for lower value lots or collection sales pre- covid , however they have now fully proved their ability to sell very high value lots well.

The latest big news in the auction world is digital art , known as NFT’s ( Non Fungible Tokens) this is a brand new development as of March 2021. This image shows a work with multiple images titled ‘The First 5,000 days ‘ created over 5,000 days by Mike Winkelmann, aka ‘Beeple’ sold for $69,000,000 in Christie’s New York . Again this was not a live traditional auction it was a timed sale as for the Hirst in fig 6. Amazingly the starting estimate was only $100 and there was no reserve , bidding only began actively a few minutes before the auction was due to close, bids rose from $100 to $69,000,000 in a matter of minutes ! It was bought by Vignesh Sundarasen a Singapore based investor. The work doesn’t exist in a tangible form, so you can’t hang it up anywhere nor have you bought the copyright which stays with Beeple the artist. However you can trade it via the unique access code you receive with the work.

Another digital work made up of multiple individual images again by Beeple, called ‘The Next Chapter’ Beeple first began making his ‘Everydays’ (one image per day) in 2007, however lockdown and its full embrace of live online auctions seems to have provided the catalyst to go global with offering digital works at auction online.

Virtual Art Dealing

Unlike the auction houses Art Dealers don’t have the monkey of back to back auction calendar to manage, however they do rely on major Art fairs and events such as Frieze, The London Art Fair and Masterpiece to showcase new works and meet new clients and make sales. Many of the events have been postponed, however The London Art Fair went digital, showcasing individual galleries such as Alan Wheatley in this image. The image and details will have been shared with all registered attendees of previous year’s fairs and is teamed up with experts and other curators to present a series of lectures, webinars and virtual events to drive sales.

More London Art fair 2021 images, featuring works for sale by Bridget Riley, Ian Davenport and others

Welcome page for 2covet a new online dealer platform enabling dealers to continue to have access to sales and new clients while their shops remain closed.

2 covet dealer page showing more traditional pictures from a dealer in late 19th and early 20th century
Pictures.

2 Covet website showing the range of categories available to buy.

A new site, ‘The Bruno Effect, due to open June 2021 focussing on antiques vintage and 20c design.

Bruno Effect’s dealer focus page

1st Dibs is an established online dealer platform, they have a full range of art and antique dealers who pay commission on sales along with a monthly subscription so it’s quite an investment , if you also have a closed shop, lockdown will have encouraged many more dealers to move online to this site. They hold online dealer and object focus events plus editors picks so many more dealers are moving online

A current ‘Editor’s Picks’ event page on 1st Dibs featuring items from different disciplines chosen by the Editor.

End of Year Old Master London Sale Review

Posted on January 22, 2021March 17, 2025 by David Dallas

Although the pandemic has had a negative impact on the way the auction rooms in London gather consignment, prices were strong and the sell-through rate was very acceptable. Traditionally, the majority of lots tend to journey in from Continental Europe but with specialists unable to travel, all inspections have had to be done on-line. There is only so much you can determine from a jpeg and unfortunately an accurate or definitive idea of condition is almost impossible to establish.

Jan Davidsz. De Heem. A banquet still life. Oil on canvas. 5’1” x 6’11”
Lot 10, Christie’s, 15th December 2020
Price Realized: £5,766,000 with premium

As numbers of lots are down, turnover is too. Christie’s offered 44 lots in their evening sale and Sotheby’s a meagre 27, compared to a normal year when 50+ would have been offered. The total for Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams in December was £39.2, just over 1/3 of the total for 2018.

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Salvator Mundi. Tempera and oil on panel. 13 1/8” x 9 3/8”
Lot 21, Christie’s, 15th December 2020
Price Realized: £2,182,500 with premium

However, prices were strong and the sell-through rate was very acceptable. The top lots at Christie’s was a sumptuous banquet still-life by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, which sold for £4.8M (hammer), a record for the artist and a record for any still-life by an Old Master. Another record price was the £1.8m (hammer) paid for a beautiful Salvator Mundi painted by Michelangelo’s master Domenico Ghirlandaio, which was in pristine condition. Sotheby’s sold a massive canvas measuring 4’ 8” x 8’ 9” of a wine harvest by David Teniers the Younger for £3M (hammer). This picture had not been seen in public for 140 years and proves that freshness to the market adds a premium of its own.

David Teniers. The Wine Harvest. Oil on canvas. 56 x 105”
Lot 12, Sotheby’s, 10th December 2020
Price Realized: £3,645,000 with premium

This year has got off to a challenging start in the art auction world, with Old Master specialists suffering from travelling restrictions, but if 2020 is anything to go by, there will be a healthy appetite for whatever they can glean and garner.

My Favourite…

Posted on November 25, 2020October 18, 2024 by Jonathan Horwich

The Cunha Braga Cup. By Jonathan Horwich, Modern Art Specialist

Knowing that I am a picture specialist, it may come as a surprise that I have chosen this 14 cm long, ceremonial drinking vessel. It is a rock crystal masterpiece of renaissance craftmanship, carving and decoration and is my favourite piece of all time. I am not sure if I know myself why I love it so much – maybe it is because it is so tactile, almost warm to the touch, and just oozes history. It fits neatly in the palm of your hand and is beautifully made – and nearly 400 years before Carl Faberge turns up and makes anything nearly as good.

The Cunha Braga Cup

I first saw the cup in October 2006 on its preview in New York. I was previewing pictures alongside my colleague from the works of art team who was accompanying the cup. My colleague gave me some of the background to its discovery. Amazingly, he spotted it among a bunch of Polaroid shots sent over from Portugal by a client just in case there was anything of interest. Even more remarkable is that the photographs were general room shots of a room full of display cabinets all rammed with various pieces and the cup was spotted tucked in a cabinet full of undistinguished objects. He was on a plane to Lisbon the next day to see it and the rest is history. I remember he told me that at first it was thought to be a copy or later version of a similar cup in a Munich museum. However, once the two were put together side by side in the museum the curators were delighted to discover that our one was made by the same craftsman as theirs – making these two the definitive pieces and ours the only other example in the world available to buy.

It had belonged to Alfredo Baptista Cunha Braga (1869-1932) from Lisbon. He acquired it circa 1920 and then by direct descent to the owners in the auction. The piece was offered in London on 30/11/2006, the pre-sale estimate was £200,000-300,000 but it sold for an astounding £1,968,000

Modern British Sculpture Sleeper

Posted on November 11, 2020August 21, 2024 by Jonathan Horwich

Known in the Art business as a ‘sleeper’ this 19 cm high, charming, and unique marble carving sold for 150 times its low estimate at Mellors and Kirk’s auction last month.

Very temptingly priced at a ‘come and buy me ‘estimate of £40-60 and intriguingly catalogued as ‘Modern British School’, this sculpture of a fawn grooming was finally hammered down at £6,000.

The Fawn is often depicted as a mythical creature and this piece certainly bears the hallmarks of early 20th century British carving. The attribution to Modern British School, although somewhat broad, is I believe, largely accurate as the piece could be attributed to the ill-fated and short-lived artist, Henri Gaudier Brzeska, (1891-1915), who although 100% French, somehow became an honorary ‘Brit’ and an integral part of the early dawn of the Modern British Art Movement at the beginning of the 20th century. He exhibited alongside greats such as Walter Sickert and Augustus John and is now very highly regarded as a sculptor and original work by him rarely if ever appears at auction. If this piece is by Gaudier then it’s a particularly good buy for someone as it could be worth 10-15 times the purchase price.

Another possibility is the sculptor and first husband of Barbara Hepworth, John Skeaping (1901-1980). If by him then it is still worth more (but not hugely more – value may increase by 2 or 3 times). I do not think it is by any of the big guns of Modern British sculpture such as Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth, at least neither of them sculpted fawns. However it is an intriguing, good quality and well carved piece and so well worth a punt at £6,000…..

Watch this space for an update in case I hear anything more about its final attribution!

Rafael Valls at Sotheby’s

Posted on July 3, 2020August 19, 2024 by David Dallas

You may have read that Rafael Valls, the well-respected St James’s stalwart, is to offer 100 paintings form his eclectic stock at Sotheby’s in London, online, between the 1st – 8th of April. The viewing is terrestrial, but the auction is not.

This is not the first time a sole trader’s stock has come up for auction and single owner sales date back centuries. Sotheby’s has an enviable record in this regard. In October 1991 they had their first sale of the works of a living artist, when David Oxtoby consigned 100 works on paper of musicians of the 1950s to be sold in aid of Nordoff Robbins Music therapy. Next up, in September 2008, was the Damien Hirst sale, which grossed over $200m. Subsequently, most of the top London Antique Furniture dealers consigned their stock to auction, notably Hotspur, Mallet, Phillips and Harris and Pelham Galleries, but this was because their market had almost evaporated.

There are two things that set this sale apart from the above and from the Moretti Mannerlist sale of 2015 and the Otto Naumann retirement sale of 2018. The first is that this is just a small, perhaps toe-in-the-water, tranche of what Rafael Valls holds and the second is that it is online. This must appeal to a younger audience unfamiliar with Old Masters. Furthermore, as we find ourselves in a climate where gatherings are banned, viewing and auctioning a sale in cyber-space helps in maintaining motion within the art world.

Nordoff Robbins Music therapy: www.nordoff-robbins.org.uk

Does Your Current Insurance Reflect Art Market Increases?

Posted on June 26, 2020November 11, 2024 by Ben Hanly

Yayoi Kusama –
KOKORO (Heart), 1988

We asked our Head of Contemporary Art, Ben Hanly, to look at how values have changed over the past few years to illustrate just how important it is to have the value of your collection updated regularly. We think you will be shocked by the results!

David Hockney (British, 1937)
Pool Made with Paper and Blue Ink for Book, 1988
Lithograph, edition of 1,000
26.5cm x 22.5cm