Billionaire divorce sell-off continues
The James Stunt sell-off continues at Christie’s this Thursday, as it offers six paintings from “an Important Private
Collection” as part of its evening Old Masters auction. The businessman is not named in the provenance but there is little doubt that he is the seller. Stunt is recently divorced from Petra Ecclestone, with whom he had an estimated £5.5billion joint fortune. One of his assets is his art collection, which favours British period portraiture in the grand manner.
Stunt was one of the biggest buyers of this genre but, earlier this year, he sold (again anonymously) three portraits by Anthony van
Dyck for £1.6million, at Christie’s New York.
Leading his sales in London this week is another painting by van Dyck, estimated at £2-3million, The Cheeke Sisters: Essex, Countess of Manchester,
and Anne, Lady Rich. In 2004, it was catalogued as “Studio of Sir Anthony van Dyck” (ie not by the Master himself) at Christie’s in New York, with an estimate of $40,000 (£30,500). It sold for $131,000, passing eventually into the hands of Philip Mould, the British dealer, who co-presents BBC’S Fake or Fortune?. From there, the painting went to Fergus Hall, the Old Master dealer (by which time it had been researched and fully catalogued as by van Dyck himself), and thence to Stunt, who lent it for five years to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Now, The Cheeke Sisters has returned to England, to be sold alongside paintings by Peter Lely, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, also from Stunt’s collection.