The old masters continue to puzzle. The latest edition of London’s ‘Classic Week’, with auctions of historic works of art from the 19th century to antiquity, seemed, on paper at least, to be the strongest on offer since the Covid pandemic -19.
There was noticeably more attendance on viewing days. Exceptional pieces, such as the first great painting by William Hogarth offered for 50 years (at Sotheby’s) and an intact and forgotten masterpiece by the Flemish painter of the 17th century Michael Sweerts and a rediscovered Fra Angelico (both offered at Christie’s) attracted many admirers. Dealers say Christie’s had the freshest material.
Sotheby’s evening sale of 49 lots of Old Masters on Wednesday fetched £39.4m (with fees), the highest total for an Old Masters sale in London since July 2019, according to the auction house at auction. Although eight lots were guaranteed, 35% of the works still failed to find buyers and the final total was well below the £56.1million Sotheby’s took from just 37 lots at its auction equivalent in 2019.
“We see very high prices for strong images. But the market is a bit selective. It’s very price sensitive,” says Alex Bell, Global Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s Old Masters. He also points out that high interest rates and inflation have made buyers more hesitant.
In terms of estimated prices, the high-value core of Sotheby’s auction came from guaranteed works presented by a seller identified by dealers as UK-based financier, landowner and collector Luca Padulli, who has sold a cache of his Old Masters to the J. Paul Getty Museum in California in 2017 for $100 million.
The impressive panel painting of the early Netherlands with several figures, Pentecostby Baroncelli’s master of portraits, was the most highly regarded of these entries, estimated at between £7 and £10 million.
Pentecost last appeared on the market at Christie’s in 2010, when it was a £4.2 million impulse buy for London-based Old Masters dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, who at the time time had acquired works for Padulli.
“I totally missed it on sight. But when it came up for auction, I thought it was a fantastic image,” recalls Baroni, who was impressed by the scale, quality and rarity of the work. Pentecost duly entered the collection of Padulli, who in 2013 placed the painting on long-term loan to the Groeningemuseum in Bruges. Here at Sotheby’s it sold for £7.9 million (all prices quoted including fees), at a single bid from its third-party guarantor.
At Domenico Beccafumi’s The Virgin and Child, with the infant Saint John the Baptist, Saint Francis and Saint Catherine of Siena
Thanks to its immaculate condition The Virgin and Child, with the infant Saint John the Baptist, Saint Francis and Saint Catherine of Siena (c.1530) by the Sienese Mannerist painter Domenico Beccafumi, from the same source, attracted more competition, selling at an American telephone offer for £5.1m against a low estimate of £3m. But a rare pair of small, loosely painted views of Venice by Canaletto, dating from the 1720s, have somehow been knocked down for £2.1million, well below the guaranteed low estimate of £3million. Previously offered for sale by a London dealer, these were acquired by Padulli after being sold at auction in 2010 for $3.9 million.
“Our buyers don’t really treat Old Masters as an investment market,” says Bell.
That may be the case, but a wealthy financier who, according to The temperatureowns 29,000 acres of farmland in Norfolk and Yorkshire and controls the lucrative freeholds of 100,000 properties in the UK, surely likes to turn a profit.
A seller at Sotheby’s who saw an exceptional return on investment was the owner of the great 17th century painting, Saint Sebastian cared for by two angels, which had been acquired for less than $100,000 at the Ivey-Selkirk auction in Saint-Louis in 2008. Later attributed to the French painter Laurent de la Hyre, it is now recognized by specialists as a Rubens, probably a of the first works of circa 1608-9. Despite its unappealing subject matter, it found a buyer at £5.1million, in line with its pre-sale guarantee.
The real problem with the sale was for works priced between £100,000 and £400,000. A bunch of decorative old masters of the kind that Tefaf Maastricht dealers used to sell to well-heeled collectors of the “professional class” remained unsold. An opulent 1628 Still life with flowers in a glass vase by Anthony Claesz is a case in point, failing to reach a low estimate of £200,000. In 1999 it sold for £265,000 at auction.
“Classical collectors have completely disappeared. People only buy the big names. The market is not interested in classical works. It’s a museum or nothing,” says London dealer Marco Voena, commenting on the seismic shift in today’s market in collecting taste away from historical art.
Perhaps the most confusing result of the night was the depiction of Hogarth’s colorful and well-preserved painting from 1742, Taste in High Life (or Taste à-la-Mode). Sold by a descendant of Edward Cecil Guinness, the Earl of Iveagh, and exhibited at Kenwood House in London for several years, this satirical dismantling of the idiocies and excesses of London Georgian fashion beautiful world sold at a one-time offer of £2.5 million (albeit a record for the artist) from a private collector on a telephone.
Hogarth, who is increasingly considered by scholars to be one of the two or three most innovative and influential artists working in England in the 18th century, is he a big enough name? But a young black man treated as the mascot of a wealthy Englishwoman may well have been a problematic presence in the painting for potential buyers today, especially museums.
“A prominent figure like that would certainly have made people wonder,” says London dealer Jonny Yarker, adding that the revisionist view of Tate Britain in its 2021-22 exhibition Hogarth and Europe, “did not help.” Yarker also pointed out that the painting had been “luxuriously cleaned”.
Content and condition, as well as pure commerce, can also be a challenge for Old Masters.
