Rounding off a brilliant year for the Old Masters
The Old Master market, so often written off as dead and buried because of the lack of supply of great pictures, has had an annus mirabilis. Whether that has anything to do with the Leonardo effect, following the $450 million (£342million) sale of the Salvator Mundi in 2017 (still not seen since), is hard to say. But the catalogue of high-profile reattributions and discoveries that has enlivened the market in the past few months is remarkable.
This summer, a gruesome, possibly long-lost Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, that had been discovered in an attic in France, was withdrawn from auction, where it had a €100million (£86million) estimate. It is believed the painting was sold privately to J Tomilson Hill, the American hedge fund manager, for a somewhat lower figure, on the understanding that it would be lent to a museum.
Then, last month, visitors to London’s Frieze Masters fair were treated with a portrait said to be “the last Botticelli in private hands”, priced at $30million (£23million). It didn’t sell, possibly because the buyer needs an export licence from Spain, which may not be forthcoming. One wonders how much higher the price would be if no licence were required.
Also last month, a small medieval painting by the Italian master Cimabue, which hung unnoticed for years in a French kitchen, sold at auction for a record €24.2million (£21million). It is thought the painting, Christ Mocked, was bought by the Alana collection of early Italian masters, formed by the Chilean banker, Alvaro Saieh and his wife, Ana Guzmán, part of which is currently on display at the Musée Jacquemartandré in Paris.
This month, a previously unknown painting by the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, of the Roman heroine Lucretia about to commit suicide after a rape, was sold in Paris for €4.8million (£4.1million), to an as-yet anonymous UK buyer. Then there is the National Gallery’s appeal to buy her father Orazio Gentileschi’s 1630s painting The Finding of Moses, which had been on loan to the Gallery since 2002, for the sum of £19.5million. All of which goes to show that, when the supply is there, Old Masters are a match for any other market.
And it doesn’t stop there: this week sees the build-up to London Art Week, when dealers and Old Master auctioneers vie for the attention of visiting collectors and museum curators. The auctions certainly have their fair share of reattributed, rediscovered, restituted and deaccessioned art for sale. Leighton House Museum is selling, for one, plus a Joseph Wright of Derby has been rediscovered and a Gainsborough reattributed.
The show-stopper, however, is heading for New York. From this Friday, Sotheby’s in London is exhibiting a recently discovered drawing by Andrea Mantegna, the hugely important early Italian Renaissance artist, to be sold in New York in January with an estimate of upwards of $12million ($9.3million). Mantegna paintings are extremely rare; drawings rarer still. Only 20 of the latter are known, of which only one was known to be privately owned, until this emerged.
Research has confirmed that it is The Triumph of Alexandria, a study for one of London’s greatest Renaissance treasures, The Triumphs of Caesar, a series of Mantegna’s paintings that were acquired by Charles I in 1629 and that hang today in Hampton Court Palace. The drawing, exactly one tenth the size of the painting, once belonged to August Grahl, the 19th century painter, who knew what it was, but by the time it sold at auction, in 1942, it had been demoted to Mantegna’s workshop (ie by the hand of an assistant, not the Master himself). The drawing then stayed in the same family, unrecognised until 2016, when it surfaced without fanfare at a small auction in Germany and was snapped up by a sharp-eyed connoisseur (identity and price yet to be revealed).
The buyer then showed it to UK Mantegna experts Prof David Ekserdjian and Hugo Chapman of the British Museum, who proposed its inclusion in the Mantegna and Bellini exhibition at the National Gallery last winter. By then, it had been inspected by paper conservation experts in Berlin, who confirmed it was precisely the kind of paper Mantegna would have used, but there were still doubts expressed by other experts.
In order to establish a clear consensus, Sotheby’s undertook an infrared analysis of the drawing with its recently established Scientific Research Department. The appearance beneath the drawing of changes made by the artist that comply with the finished painting confirmed that this was the real thing.
“I cannot conceive,” rejoiced Cristiana Romalli, Sotheby’s director of Old Master drawings, “of a more important drawing by one of the top Renaissance artists.”