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Old Masters up for auction

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Daily Telegraph 26 January 2009
By Colin Geadell

 

Christie's Important Old Master Paintings: Federico Barocci Urbino
Christie's Important Old Master Paintings: Federico Barocci Urbino c. 1535-1612. Head of Saint John the Evangelist, an oil study for The Entombment of Christ in the church of Santa Croce, Senigallia. Estimate $400,000 - 600,000

Every picture tells a story, they say, but none do so more than the Old Masters, and in this week's Old Master sales in New York there are stories galore. Look closely and you will find paintings once owned by kings, prime ministers, distinguished scholars and distressed bankers, confiscated by Nazis or long thought lost, authorship unknown.

The sales begin at Christie's with a collection formed by the art historian Professor Julius Held, who died in 2002. Held is remembered for his dispute over the authenticity of some Rubens cartoons acquired by the National Museum of Wales in the late 1970s, which caused much embarrassment all round.

He was also an omnivorous collector, buying on an academic's limited budget and with an eye for the unattributed sketch he could match to a master's hand. In 1984 he donated 200 drawings to the National Gallery of Washington, and this evening some 400 of his paintings and drawings go under the hammer.

Meanwhile, the research teams at Sotheby's and Christie's have also identified previously unknown paintings by Guercino, Frederico Barocci, Bartolomeo Schedoni and Watteau, which are to be sold. It seems extraordinary how many paintings by estabkished artists are still uncovered every year.

Washed up on the shore of restituted, Nazi-looted art are several paintings each with its own tragic history. A $300,000 (£210,000) painting by Jan Brueghel the Younger at Christie's had belonged to Hugo Kaufmann, a banker in Amsterdam in the 1930s who was prevented from escaping to America and died with his immediate family at Auschwitz. It was not until 2006 that his nephew, then 90 years old, was able to reclaim the painting.

Sotheby's has a 1624 painting of a bagpipe player by the Dutch artist Hendrick Ter Brugghen, which the German industrialist Herbert von Klemperer was forced to sell in 1938. It then hung in a museum in Cologne until last July, when it was returned to von Klemperer's heirs. Considered one of Ter Brugghen's masterpieces, it is estimated to fetch a record $4-6 million.

Like forced sales and forgotten pictures, distress sales are all part of the rich tapestry of art-market history. A painting of the Madonna and Child with two angels, once thought to be by Botticelli ($200,000-300,000), was bought by the British banker Robert Benson in the 1880s. But in 1927, Benson fell on hard times and had to sell his collection, which included masterpieces by Duccio, Bellini, and Titian, as well as this painting, to raise cash. That sale, to the art dealer Joseph Duveen for $4 million, made headlines, bemoaning the loss of British-held masterpieces to America.

And then there are the pictures with real social snob appeal. A full-length Van Dyck portrait of Anne Cavendish, Lady Rich ($500,000-700,000), graced some of the most distinguished collections of the 17th and 18th centuries, notably that of Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, the majority of whose pictures were sold to Catherine the Great and now reside at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. This portrait, however, escaped the cull because it was never hung at the family's stately pile, Houghton Hall in Norfolk, but in Walpole's London residence in Grosvenor Street.

An even grander history of ownership is attached to a Venetian view by Canaletto ($2.5-3.5 million) that was once in the collection of King George III. Why it ever left the collection is still a mystery, but here it is, being sold by American book publisher Cornelia Bessie to raise funds for the BBC World Service Trust.

And perhaps grander still is a late Titian, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, ($4-6 million), that was part of King Charles I's extraordinary collection, secreted away by Thomas Cromwell at the time of the collection's dispersal, and then returned to the Royal Collection after the Restoration. But that too went missing until it reappeared, covered in dark varnish and with additions by another artist at a sale in 1994 where, attributed only to the "studio of Titian", it sold for £9,200. The buyer, businessman Luigi Koelliker, established it was by Titian when he had it cleaned, and then that it had belonged to King Charles when an eagle-eyed curator at the National Gallery of Scotland discovered a royal cipher on the back.

Last December, the Old Master sales in London survived the ravages of the recession quite comfortably. With a little help from the romance and history attached to the paintings on offer this week, these New York sales might just do so too.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/artsales/4346770/Old-Masters-up-for-auction.html
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