Rembrandt, Antiques Sales Warm Up Winter
March 2007
NEW YORK—With scarcity afflicting the Old Masters market, an auction lineup that includes
pictures by top-tier painters and exceptional works by lesser masters is bound to make waves. Such was the case here on January 25 and 26, when Sotheby’s achieved the highest-ever total for an Old Masters sale, $110,993,240. The top lot by a long way was Rembrandt’s “Saint James the Greater,” 1661 (right, est. $18 million–$25 million), which sold to an anonymous bidder for $25,800,000, not quite reaching the record of $28.7 million set in 2000. A somber, naturalistic portrait dominated by brooding browns, it is the last of Rembrandt’s late New Testament–themed religious pictures in private hands. Last March at TEFAF Maastricht it was in the booth of New York dealer Salander-O’Reilly with a $50 million price tag, intended for a museum, but did not sell. Interestingly, as “Saint James” was being hammered down, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was close to concluding negotiations with England’s National Trust to buy Rembrandt’s “Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet,” 1657, for approximately $80 million. And at Sotheby’s earlier in the morning, another Rembrandt, “Portrait of a Young Woman in a Black Cap,” went for $9 million against an estimate of $3 million to $4 million.
A surprise in the sale was the impressive performance of a military portrait from 1771 to 1772 by Joseph Wright of Derby. Captain Robert Shore Milnes is shown posing in a dashing uniform against a sylvan background as a groom holds his horse in the lower right of the canvas. Estimated at $1 million to $1.5 million, the painting went for a record $7,208,000 to London dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, bidding for an American client.
A Botticelli portrait of a woman in profile (est. $2.5 million–$3.5 million) sold for $4,744,000. It was dated to the 1480s, the same period in which the artist painted “The Birth of Venus.” An El Greco Annunciation, painted in the artist’s typical elongated Mannerist style, was pegged at a puzzlingly modest $600,000 to $800,000, but took off once the bidding got underway. It ended up selling for $4,184,000 to a private buyer. Among other significant Spanish works, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Christ and the Virgin in the House of Nazareth (est. $1.5 million–$2 million) went for $3,512,000, and Goya’s portrait of the actress Rita Luna, with the same estimate, brought $2,616,000. WINTER ANTIQUES SHOW
This much-awaited fair at the Park Avenue Seventh Regiment Armory did not disappoint. The definition of “antiques” here went well beyond furniture and furnishings to include such rare delights as Eskimo art, literary autographs and even guns, swords and medieval armor. The crowds were dense, with attendance estimated at 25,000, and dealers reported brisk sales.
American specialist Leigh Keno sold more than 70 percent of his booth, including a 1760 Newport, Rhode Island, mahogany chair for $410,000 and an unusual African-American yellow-pine pictographic desk from a Mississippi plantation, dated in the 1870s. Pre-Columbian and photography dealer Spencer Throckmorton had a Late Classic Maya rain-dancer statue in his booth at an asking price of $100,000. As the fair ended, three museums were considering acquiring it, with the Met getting first dibs and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Dallas Museum of the Arts back in line. An Aztec stone jaguar figure sold for $40,000 to a private collector. Gallery director Kraige Block says, “It was a terrific, record-breaking fair for us, the best we’ve ever done.”
Philadelphia dealer Elle Shushan, who specializes in portrait miniatures, sold a double miniature of English kings (and brothers) George VI and Edward VIII as young boys, as well as one by John Wood Dodge depicting two New Orleans Creole girls from 1843—both for between $20,000 and $30,000. More remarkably, Shushan also sold the booth itself—a miniature copy of a 1750 room from historic house in Westover, Virginia. A customer made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, and the replica is headed for “the playroom of a 6- or 7-year-old girl,” says Shushan, who adds, “I never heard of anyone doing that before.”
On opening night, Fred Giampietro of New Haven sold an Indian tobacconist trade figure for $295,000 and a life-sized, cast-iron stag for $135,000. David Schorsch and Eileen Smiles of Woodbury, Connecticut, sold an 1825 tavern sign from Maine for a huge $750,000, and Asian art dealer Joan Mirviss sold two important Japanese woodblock prints, one by Suzuki Harunobo and the other by Hiroshige. John Alexander Ltd. sold a drop-leaf center table by Sir Frank William Brangwyn, circa 1930, which the dealer called “the single best piece the gallery has ever owned.”