Salerooms
Old Master surprises
Susan Moore
here are two kind of discoveries made at Old Master sales: those made by the saleroom's specialists, and those made by their clients. The auction houses prefer the first. Certainly the last year or two has seen some spectacular 'sleepers' — like the Car- avaggio St John the Baptist bought for £19,000 by Nando Peretti of London's Walpole Gallery; Sotheby's London had catalogued it as 'circle of Caravaggio'. Now the acknowledged Caravaggio experts have accepted it as an autograph work. Then there was New York dealer Richard Feigen who took a £12,000 punt on a filthy panel attributed to Zanobi Strozzi and, after its cleaning, found himself the proud possessor of a missing predella panel from a lost altarpiece by his master, Fra Angelico.
Rediscoveries of the other kind account- ed for most of the surprises at last week's phenomenally successful Old Masters sales in New York. There was, for instance, an incredibly beautiful and previously unknown Pieta by Ludovico Carracci (not to be confused with his more celebrated cousin, Annibale), a dream of a picture, not least given its wonderful condition. Christie's estimated it at $300,000- $500,000, but this was a painting that everyone seemed to want. After a heated battle, it was sold for $5.2 million to deal- ers Salander O'Reilly, bidding for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, against Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. It is a remarkable price, not least for a gritty, uncompromis- ing image of the dead Christ, the sort of Italian Baroque picture that — until now at least — has never been easy to sell.
Another record price was realised for another recent rediscovery, one of those rare and extraordinary proto-surreal con- fections by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (always the wag's favourite at those after-dinner games where you have to choose any artist from the past to paint your portrait). One way up, it is a basket of fruit; turn the painting 180 degrees and, lo and behold, a portrait of a man. Sotheby's gave it $200,000-$300,000; it was bought for $1.4 million by French & Co. At the same sale, a Madonna and Child by Andrea del Sarto that had been given to a Massachusetts church in 1935 but was believed to have been an 18th-century copy, sold for a provi- dential — and record — $1.1 million.
Sotheby's top lot, however, was Rubens's portrait of a man as the god Mars, which sold, bang on target, for a record $8.2 mil- lion (£5 million). It was, amazingly, the portrait's debut at auction. No doubt it was widely admired during its recent appear- ance at the Met (it took a prolonged bow at the Filippo Negroli show as Mars's Antique-style helmet, which belonged to Rubens, has now been attributed to the great 16th-century Milanese armourer), and it is tempting to see its sale now as an example of the uneasy alliance of museum scholarship and the art trade. A year after the show closed, the picture was on the block. I wonder how many works exhibited in The Treasure Houses of Britain show in Washington in 1985-86, for instance, are still in the same hands? Certainly a signifi- cant proportion of Art Treasures of the Unit- ed Kingdom held in Manchester in 1857 left the country soon after.
For vendors, as well as for the auction houses, the January sales could not have been better. Sotheby's picture sale notched up $47.5 million, with 62 per cent of lots selling above the high estimate; Christie's total was $39 million, with 91 per cent sold by value, its best result for a decade. The demand for Old Master paintings and drawings in America has become seemingly unquenchable as more new buyers contin- ue to move into a once recherche market that is now deemed to offer, relatively speaking, rather good value for money. Sotheby's new-style 'Old Masters 2000' cat- alogue set out to cater to this new and largely untutored audience, offering user- friendly art historical datelines and intro- ductions to each section. It seemed to pay off, with a 14th-century gold-ground panel, for one, a Crucifixion by Taddeo Gaddi, selling to a new private client sufficiently confident to pay five times over estimate, $690,000.
American museums, too, were active, not just the Met. Dealer Kate Ganz bought Domenichino's delectable 'Rebuke of Adam and Eve' for $3.3 million on behalf of the National Gallery of Art in Washing- ton, and rumour has it that they bought the Boilly at Christie's too. Here, the Getty secured probably the best small-scale fin- ished oil by G.B. Tiepolo ever to appear at auction, for another record, $2.2 million. In Christie's drawings sale, an anonymous donor paid a mighty $3.7 million (double the low estimate) for a Rembrandt pen and ink landscape sketch for the Morgan Library — it had sold in 1984, for £507,000, from the Chatsworth Collection. On the subject of Rembrandt drawings — and the kind of discoveries that buyers prefer — can one presume that the American private collector who paid $107,000 for a pen and ink sketch of a broad river with boats, cata- logued as by Rembrandt's pupil Anthonie van Borssom and estimated at $8,000- $10,000, believes he has just acquired the bargain of the week?
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