MARKET NEWS
Aportrait that has been hanging in a Cambridge town house for more than 100 years has been identified as a portrait of Jane Seymour, the Queen of England from 1536-1537, by a follower of the famous court painter Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein’s similar portrait, painted shortly after the sitter’s marriage to the King, currently hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and a preparatory drawing is in the Royal Collection in Windsor Castle. In each, the sitter wears a pearshaped pendant of rubies and pearls, later seen in portraits of Katherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife. Another similar portrait, which used to be in the Royal Collection, is now in the Mauritshuis in Holland. The Cambridge portrait was shown by the local auctioneer, Cheffins, to the art consultant John Somerville, who confirmed the identity of the sitter and dated it to the 16th century. A dendrochronological test found that the tree from which the panel was taken was felled in about 1532, increasing the possibility that the portrait was painted in Holbein’s studio during his lifetime. Cheffins, which will be selling the portrait in June, has estimated it to fetch between £20,000 and £30,000. Demand for the playful paintings of the Indian figurative artist Bhupen Khakhar, who died in 2003, has continued to bubble away right up to the eve of his Tate Modern retrospective exhibition which opens this week (see review opposite). In March, we pinpointed Khakhar as an artist to watch just before his 1970 painting
Church Gardener was offered in New York with a £140,000 estimate. It later sold for £346,000. Then last week, a smaller painting by Khakhar from 1986, At New Jersey, 1986, appeared at Christie’s in South Kensington with a £50,000 estimate and went on to sell for £134,500. The seller, a collector from Hong Kong, may have sensed how Khakhar’s market was going a little earlier. They bought this painting at auction in New York in 2014 for £53,000; that’s a mark-up of 154 per cent in less than two years. In a delightful coincidence – or rather merger of circumstances – the Dora Maurer exhibition at White Cube referred to in this week’s feature is curated by Katharine Kostyal, formerly Katharine Burton of Christie’s and the Simon Lee Gallery, who went to White Cube to conduct secondary-market (ie, second-hand as opposed to fresh from the studio) sales. At the same time, her husband, Karl Kostyal, a financial entrepreneur who got the art bug and opened his own small gallery in Savile Row in 2010, is showing work by Maurer’s husband, the Hungarian artist Tibor Gayor, with whom she shares a studio in Budapest. Karl Kostyal is of Hungarian origin and is a member of Tate’s acquisition committee, helping to broaden its holdings of eastern European art by neglected artists. This must be one of the first incidences of a husband and wife working with different galleries and exhibiting husband-and-wife artists simultaneously at each of them. Good teamwork from one of the art world’s new power couples.