Art Market
Re-identified Old Masters set the New York salerooms alight in January
Huon Mallalieu finds out that the right name adds value
AT the time of writing, I have had no news of the New York Master Drawings week, but on the evidence of Sotheby’s sales of Old Master paintings, drawings and sculpture around the same time at the end of January, the dealers should have enjoyed some success. In both the evening and day paintings sessions, eight of the 10 most expensive lots went to private collectors from America or Europe.
It is generally a pleasure to re-meet old friends and, this week, there are two. Adam de Coster (1585/6–1643) fell into the most profound obscurity after his death, despite having established a good reputation as a ‘pictor noctium’, or Caravaggesque tenebrous painter, and having his portrait painted by Van Dyck. He was born in Mechelen, midway between Brussels and Antwerp and passed most of his career in the latter city, although he visited Hamburg, and it seems likely that he also went to Italy.
In fact, the 52¾in by 373⁄8in painting that Sotheby’s sold for $4.85 million (£8.868m), 2½ times the estimate, could be taken as evidence for an Italian journey. From the early 17th century to the 1950s, it was in the collection of the Principe di Galati in Palermo, where it was listed as by Gerrit van Honthorst.
The model for A Young Woman holding a Distaff before a lit Candle (Fig 3) also appears wearing the same red dress and similar turban and sash in The Denial of St Peter by de Coster, which also seems to have an Italian provenance.
Almost all his works suffered misattribution of the centuries and it was only in the 1960s that Benedict Nicolson brought him back to the light. The Sotheby painting was only given back to him on its previous visit to the saleroom, when I last wrote about it here (Country Life, February 13, 1992). I was greatly taken by the ‘almost ideally beautiful, slightly tranced, face’ contrasted to the thicker wrists of a working girl painted from life.
I also speculated as to whether it was a parable on Domestic Virtue, as, in French, a pun could be made between buisson (distaff) and boisseau (a bushel), but there is no knowing whether de Coster spoke French as well as Flemish and it doesn’t work in the latter. However, I still think it a very beautiful work. It was one of the top lots bought anonymously, so one cannot say whether by private, trade or museum.
The top lot of the series was both a recent acquaintance and a new discovery, a 46½in by 22in study of a horse and rider by Rubens (Fig 1), which sold for $5,075,000 (£4.046m). Only the horse was fully realised, with the rider less so, but, until recently, the rider was worked up and a background sky and landscape had been added. In June 2015, still in that state and catalogued as ‘After Sir Anthony Van Dyck’, it was sold by Christie’s, Amsterdam, for a princely €12,500. It has now been convincingly authenticated by Rubens scholars, and must have had a very happy vendor in New York. Nowadays, Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639) is probably less remembered than his daughter Artemisia (1593–1653), which one might think to be a rebalancing of art history by modern equality campaigners. She is indeed a feminist heroine, not only for her ability, but also because of her rape by the vile Agostino Tassi, but I suspect that she has always been regarded as the better painter of the two.
She was hugely successful for much of her career and even in 1849, when few female painters were remembered at all, Hobbes’s Picture Collector’s Manual notes: ‘In portraits she excelled her father.’
Both she and her father worked for Charles I, who owned her celebrated self-portrait as the spirit of painting and at Sotheby’s was one of Orazio’s paintings from the royal collection. The 16½in by 143⁄8in Head of a Woman (Fig 2) was bought by Charles in the early 1630s and in ‘Britain’s Greatest Sale’
(COUNTRY LIFE, December 23/30,
1999), it was acquired with 50 other pictures and some clothes by a consortium headed by Robert Houghton, a Puritan but nonetheless formerly the King’s brewer.
Its whereabouts thereafter are unknown until a 1930 exhibition at the RA. It has been in America since 1989, and now it has sold for $1,812,500 (£1.445m), against a $2 million to $3 million estimate.
The drawings session was dominated by British watercolours, with two Turners and a Burne-jones heading the field and a Blake not far behind. The Turners were both Swiss views, one very probably and the other certainly on Lake Thun. The first
(Fig 4), which measured 97∕8in by 14¼in, sold for $756,500 (£603,657), and the second, slightly smaller, for $612,500 (£488,621). They are said to have belonged to Turner’s mistress and companion, Sophia Booth, to have passed from her to John Heugh, a merchant who owned Holman Hunt’s The
Scapegoat, and from him to a Liverpool shipping man Ralph Brocklebank, a notable watercolour collector. Although they were sold by his executors, his son, a still more notable collector, bought them back, and they remained with the family until now.
The Burne-jones was the 23in by 217∕8in The Madness of Sir Tristram (Fig 5), in water and bodycolour, which made $408,500 (£325,822). It was first owned by Aglaia Ionides, one of the Pre-raphaelites’ Greek muses, and next by Sir William Tate, son of the gallery founder. Next week Founding pot