MARKET NEWS
Last summer, a painting of horses exercising with their groom described as “After George Stubbs”, ie, a copy of a work by the great British sporting painter, was offered at Christie’s New York with a guide price of $3,000 to $5,000. It was being sold by the Huntington Library, California, which had once thought it was a genuine Stubbs but changed its mind. None the less, it sold for $215,000 (£177,000) – a lot for a copy, but not the price of a real Stubbs. The buyer, it transpires, was Archie Parker of the Parker Gallery in London, who has now had the painting cleaned and fully researched and will show it at the British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA) fair in Chelsea tomorrow as a fully attributed Stubbs. Parker, whose father, Buffy, is renowned for having discovered a Sebastiano del Piombo (now in the Getty Museum), explains that the Huntington was selling it as ‘‘After’’ Stubbs because they believed it was a later copy of an authorised painting that had been in the Ambrose Clark collection in America. However, the Huntington picture has now been revealed to have been painted a year earlier, and is the primary version. It is now priced at £750,000. Last week, Dreweatt’s in Newbury witnessed aggressive bidding for works from the This Moai Kavakava from Easter Island fetched £117,500 collection of the art dealer Jan Krugier. After his death, Christie’s and Sotheby’s disposed of his multimillionpound collection. Sotheby’s left the lower valued works to Dreweatt’s. One was an almost 9ft autobiographical ink drawing on calico by the mid-20th-century “outsider” artist Madge Gill. Nothing by Gill had sold at auction for more than £4,400, and this, perhaps because of its unwieldy size, was estimated at just £1,000. But after intense competition it was knocked down for £37,200 to a private UK collector. Another bidding war broke out for an 18in wood carving of a standing figure, known as a Moai Kavakava, from Easter Island. Some mystery surrounds this piece, as Krugier bought it in 2001, catalogued as a genuine 19th-century carving, from Sotheby’s New York for $192,750. But Dreweatt’s described it as late-20thcentury and estimated it at £400. Specialist dealer Lance Entwistle has no doubt it is authentic, but condition issues (it appears to have been scrubbed at some point) must have put Sotheby’s off the scent before they passed it on to Dreweatt’s as a recent tourist copy. A private collector outbid a London dealer to buy it at £117,500. But had it been a better example and in perfect condition it would have been worth £1 million, Entwistle says. The sale, estimated at £156,820, made £515,313.