The artful spotter! Dusty old painting bought for £78,000 set to go for £3.5m
A KEEN-EYED art buyer who had a hunch about a dusty old portrait is set to collect £3.5million when it is sold at auction.
The anonymous spotter snapped up Rubens’ Portrait Of A Lady for £78,000 after it had remained in a family collection for 139 years.
After layers of dirt and varnish were removed it was discovered to be a work by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.
Glee
It had been catalogued during the sale as being from his workshop.
That meant it was thought to have been painted by one of the his assistants.
Now it will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London with a £2.5million to £3.5million estimate.
The 17th-century masterpiece was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1902 as a work by Rubens.
But Andrew Fletcher, Sotheby’s head of department for Old Master paintings, said its origins had been “forgotten about”.
Andrew said of the discovery: “It was quite dirty, with hundreds of years of dirt and old varnish on it.
“Then this rather wonderful Rubens was revealed.
“It’s one of those moments that you have a couple of times a year when you walk in and you just have this wonderful instant reaction of glee.”
Andrew said some hidden details were brought out with an infrared camera.
He added: “You can see lots of little changes in his painting of the fingers and hands.
“There is one enormous change in the sky where the red curtain descended.
“Rubens obviously wasn’t happy with that so pushed it back up and included more sky.”
The painting will be offered for auction at Sotheby’s on July 29.
It is their first major evening sale in London since the lockdown began.