Perils of chasing Old Masters
Buyers used to modern art’s uncertainties can easily come unstuck, says Colin Gleadell
The trials of the Old Master market were played out under the glare of the auction-room spotlight in London last week, where the three main salerooms accumulated just over £50 million in five auctions. This time last year, the equivalent sales made £79 million, and two years ago, £90 million. On an annual basis, Old Master sales at auction in London have fallen by 41.4 per cent from £210 million in 2014, to £123 million this year.
All, though, is not lost. After dismal sales at Bonhams, where only one third of the lots sold, and Christie’s, where a £6.4 million total must have been one of the lowest in living memory, Sotheby’s came to the rescue with a £22.6 million sale that, while not a triumph, was at least respectable.
For Christie’s, it was the failure of their highest estimated lots that hurt most. An enchanting, Dürer-inspired painting on vellum of a wide-eyed hare in a wonderland of plants and insects by Hans Hoffmann was similar to another which sold 14 years ago for £1.64 million to the J Paul Getty Museum, but its estimate of £4 million proved a step too far for buyers.
Then there was the withdrawal of a 15th-century tondo of the Virgin and Child by the Netherlandish master Hans Memling, which had been estimated at £2.5 million. The painting was sold privately before the auction, said Christie’s.
Instead, one of many versions of Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Bird
Trap found just one bidder to meet its £1 million estimate. Brueghel prices, previously fuelled by Russian and Asian interest, are on hold. Last week, Russians seemed to be buying lower valued paintings from the workshops of Brueghel and Joos van Cleve.
Attracting more competition was a dramatic scene from Virgil’s
Aeneid by the Baroque painter Pietro Testa. This painting had been unsold in New York two years ago with a $3 million estimate. Now, with a drastically reduced estimate of £300,000 ($470,000), it was pursued by London art advisor Hugo Nathan, before selling to a telephone bidder for a record £746,500. Undeterred, Nathan went on to buy a fantastical composition by the French rococo painter Charles-Antoine Coypel, for a double-estimate £506,500. In both cases, said Nathan, the estimates were set reasonably and attracted competition – key to a good auction.
Sotheby’s exceeded Christie’s meagre total with its first eight lots. These included an early example of Netherlandish Renaissance painting – a perfectly preserved Virgin and Child by Jan Gossaert, which sold for a record £4.6 million – and a taste of the arrival of the early Renaissance in Paris in the mid-15th century with an altar panel depicting the arrest of Christ. Heavily influenced by Rogier van der Weyden, it is thought to have been painted by one André d’Ypres. More will be revealed, no doubt, by the Louvre Museum which bought it after heavy competition for £965,000.
Other features were the strong prices for Italian devotional gold ground paintings and the best baroque paintings. One of these, Sebastiano Ricci’s Titianesque Holy Family with
John the Baptist, more than doubled the price it fetched 10 years ago, selling to London dealer, Danny Katz, for £389,000. For British art, results were up and down. The classic chiaroscuro of Joseph Wright of Derby’s Grotto
in the Gulf of Salerno excited a number of bidders who, in spite of its questionable condition, ran it far above a £100,000 estimate to £665,000. But two portraits by van Dyck, one which had been enlarged at a later date, failed to sell amid concerns that too many van Dycks had ben “discovered” in recent years to be true. This element of uncertainty, is, apart from the problem of supply, one of the things that holds back the Old Master market, which contains many pitfalls for the unwary and underinformed.