Yahoo Finance Old Master £118m sales update: mystery seller named, and sells to Getty Museum
£118 million of Old Master paintings and drawings were auctioned in London last week – evidence that when the supply is forthcoming, the demand is there. A £24 million Francesco Guardi of Venice from the descendants of former Arts Minister, Paul Channon (a Guinness heir), and an £18.5 million JMW Turner were the big draws.
Observing the supply line was the charismatic dealer Jean-Luc Baroni, who paid a record £2.6 million for a rare, perfectly preserved ink drawing of a coronation scene in Venice by Canaletto, but then had to sit back impassively as a collector he has been advising for years sold a string of acquisitions worth over £10 million at Sotheby’s and Christie’s rather than through him.
The sales made little or no gain, however. An exceptional late Murillo of Christ crowned with thorns, for example, which Baroni bought for the collector in 2005 for £2.5 million, sold for £2.7 million (a loss to the seller after Sotheby’s commissions are deducted), while a scene of pagan sacrifice by Castiglione, which he bought in 2000 for nearly £1 million, sold for just £633,000.
The Holy Family, an almost photo realist painting by the 17th century Florentine Alessandro Rosi, sold to New York dealer Otto Naumann for what Christie’s thought was a record £233,000 (€265,000). But Baroni had paid more – €433,000 – for it at a sale in Dijon in 2007.
“I would have preferred to have made a catalogue of this collection and exhibited it with a foundation,” said Baroni, but denied the rumours of a bust up adding: “We are still friends”.
Subsequently, the mystery seller was revealed by the Art Newspaper as 62 year-old Luca Padulli, founder of British Investment company, Camomille Associates. Mr Padulli is also the source of a collection of Old Master drawings and paintings by Watteau, Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto and others, estimated to be worth some $100 million, which were acquired by the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles after this report was published. So maybe he did not do so badly afterall.
One of the fastest profits of the sales was made by a bargain-hunter worthy of the BBC’s Fake or Fortune programme. Last year at an auction in Washington they bought a painting of a grim-looking old woman on a split panel that was catalogued as ‘Studio of Rubens’ (i.e., by one of his assistants) for $27,000.
Then they cleaned up and prettified her, covered up the panel cracks, and most importantly, had the painting confirmed as by Rubens himself by the by the Rubenianum in Antwerp. Thus transformed, it sold for £416,750 ($538,700).
The longest bidding battle of the sales came when a record, five-times-estimate £557,000 was paid by dealer Johnny van Haeften for a still life catalogued as by the rarely seen 17th century artist, David Rijckaert the Younger. Cornered after the sale, van Haeften displayed his superior knowledge: “It’s not Rijckaert; it’s Osias Beert,” he beamed (Beert can make nearer a million).
And what about the old man’s head attributed to Rembrandt that he chased over estimate until it sold to a phone bidder for £2.1 million? “Well I obviously didn’t think it was Rembrandt because I wouldn’t have stopped there,” he said. “But I had a hunch it was by Rembrandt’s son, Titus.”
Trying to identify changes in taste in this market is always a challenge, but Sotheby’s George Gordon was ready to try – noting a certain contrariness towards the traditional notions of grace and charm and citing the extremely well-drawn but mad-looking fool of the court of Anne of Hungary by Jan van Hammersen which sold for a triple-estimate record £2.2 million pounds.
