Left unloved in the spare room, a £540,000 Old Master
A COUPLE who consigned an old painting to the spare bedroom because they didn’t like it were left in shock when it fetched £540,000 at auction.
The picture of St John the Evangelist had been valued at £600 and was entered into the sale at the last minute alongside items of furniture in a clearout to fund urgent repairs to the sellers’ Oxfordshire farmhouse.
When Holloway’s Auctioneers in Banbury listed the painting in its catalogue, the firm was inundated with calls and decided it must have undervalued the work – so raised the estimate to £2,000. But the painting is believed to be a 17th-century Old Master, possibly by a student of Anthony van Dyck, and two knowledgeable bidders in the room drove up the price to £540,000.
The anonymous sellers were following proceedings online, via a smartphone, and “nearly swerved off the road” when the hammer fell.
Jasper Marsh, the auctioneer, described the painting as a “good old fashioned sleeper” – a family heirloom with hidden value. James Lee, his colleague, was shown it during a tour of the house.
“They are very nice people who needed to raise funds for repairs on their farmhouse and James went to have a look at some items they had.
“The painting had been in the family for generations, since before the 1890s. The owners didn’t like it, which is why they put it out of the way in a spare bedroom. They directed him to the painting and I think he just said, ‘OK, we’ll take it as well’. They would have been happy to have received our original estimated price for it,” Mr Marsh said.
“We started the bidding at £2,000 and it was between a bidder in the room and a phone bidder who dropped out at £28,000. Then someone else in the room joined in, and when the bidding reached £200,000 it went up in £5,000 increments.” The couple also sold a pair of chairs, one of which “their very old and incontinent dog used to sleep on”, that fetched £35,000.