In a bid to stay relevant, the Old Masters trade has been trying to draw in younger buyers to counter its shrinking collector base, which generally comprises wealthy, older men. No easy task, but by encouraging cross-category buying and offering rare, unique works bolstered by compelling narratives, the top houses are seeing some success in a sticky market. This week saw Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams adopt these strategies as they held Old Masters auctions in London.
For Christie’s Old Masters evening sale on Tuesday, the house hung its hat on Canaletto’s Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day (circa 1732), and it paid off. The painting, once owned by the UK’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, was initially guaranteed by the house and later backed by a third-party guarantee. It outstripped its £20 million ($27.5 million) estimate, selling for £31.9 million ($43.7 million) (all reported prices include fees). That was more than half of the sale’s overall total of £60.8 million ($83.6 million), against its £40 million ($54.5 million) estimate, and set a new auction record for Canaletto. His previous record was £18.6 million ($24.6 million) for Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto (1724), sold at Sotheby’s London in 2005.
Micheal Moses of JP Mei & MA Moses Art Market Consultancy told ARTnews that Christie’s Canaletto sale “gave the prior owner a 5.5 percent return, which is above the mean compound annual return (CAR) of the 43 Canaletto works we have in our repeat sales database.” Not a bad result given the auction market’s year-on-year decline.
Tuesday’s sale saw the highest sell-through rate by value in the history of Christie’s Old Masters sales (99 percent), and the house’s strongest sell-through rate by lot since 2012 (87 percent).
“[This weeks Old Masters auction results in London] were strong and higher than expected because the sales were not filled with particularly good pictures, bar some exceptions,” Milo Dickinson, the managing director of London Old Masters gallery Dickinson, told ARTnews.
He added that, “In this market, you can see collectors are looking to buy artists with a long track record of success, and Old Masters provides it, whether it’s Rubens or Constable or Titian.”
Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s global head of Old Masters, told ARTnews that the 42 lots in Tuesday’s auction represented “far more variety compared to similar sales 10 or 20 years ago.”
He said the five people bidding on the Canaletto “were all cross-category buyers,” which he said is the result of a “strategy that Christie’s is very much employing.”
Fletcher added that Sotheby’s private Old Master sales “have been exceptional for several years now.” This is no surprise; art advisors have told ARTnews that as auctions struggle to get out of the long grass across all categories, private sales are thriving, especially for Grade-A works.
Sotheby’s is also pushing cross-category bidding in a bid to breathe life into the Old Masters game. In December, Alex Branczik, the house’s head of modern and contemporary art, told me that “collecting across categories is something that we have been witnessing—and encouraging—for many years now.”
Sotheby’s Old Masters evening sale on Wednesday brought in £14.5 million ($19.9 million), which fell squarely within its estimate of £11.5 million to £17.8 million ($15.6 million to $24.2 million).
J.M.W Turner’s recently rediscovered The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol (1792) sold to a private British collector for £1.9 million ($2.6 million), seven times its estimate, after it was chased by four bidders. One of the unlucky ones was the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, which had fundraised £109,000 ($148,000) to boost its chances of winning the work, painted by Turner when he was just 17.
“The Turner shows that there are still great masterpieces out there waiting to be discovered,” Julian Gascoigne, a senior director at Sotheby’s specializing in early British paintings, told ARTnews. “There is a deep vein of interest in Turner in the wider population of the UK—he is an artist who is embedded in our collective psyche.”
George Gordon, Sotheby’s co-chairman of Old Masters, said the sale’s result is a sign of a healthy market, “one where people are after rarities and discoveries.”
“[Sotheby’s] is still leading the market globally for Old Masters this year, and we have just announced that in November we will be offering the collection of Manny Davidson, with some exceptional works by Rubens, Reynolds, Michael Sweerts, and Thomas de Keyser,” he told ARTnews.
The sell-through rate on Wednesday was 81 percent, and the sale witnessed three artist records: Lorenzo di Credi’s Saint Quirinus of Neuss (undated) for £2.7 million ($3.7 million), Corneille de Lyon’s Portrait of a merchant (undated) for £863,600 ($1.2 million), and Diana de Rosa’s Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist (undated) for £317,500 ($430,000).
Artemisia Gentileschi’s David with the head of Goliath (circa 1638)—painted while the artist was in London—also sold well for £2 million ($2.7 million).
At the Old Masters sale at Bonhams, also on Wednesday, George Gower’s Portrait of Sir Edward Monins of Waldershare (1575)was the top result, selling for well above its £300,000 high estimate for £1.1 million ($1.5 million).
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Lisa Greaves, Bonhams head of Old Master paintings, told ARTnews that this week’s sales results “are typical of the market the moment, in that the better works are performing more strongly than the middle market.”
She said Bonhams is seeing more Asian collectors enter the Old Masters fray, which she said is partly due to successful marketing drawing in buyers from the region. But in what is increasingly being called a buyer’s market, is the house finding it harder to consign works?
“It is tricky, but we are very lucky to be able to call on our long-standing relationships with collectors, as shown by the Gower portrait,” according to Greaves.
On a final note, this week’s Old Master auctions were the first since the European Union’s new anti-trafficking legislation was implemented. It means artworks that are more than two centuries old and valued over €18, 000 ($21,000) are subject to stricter criteria. Are dealers worried this will bog them down in more EU bureaucracy?
“The new EU law is a classic case of a law with good intentions, but which will have unforeseen damaging consequences,” Dickinson told ARTnews. “Whoever drafted it clearly does not have an understanding of the intricacies of the art market. It will impact some EU-based dealers, particularly galleries involved in antiquities and Asian and African art. Collectors in the past did not need to worry about provenance, so didn’t record it like we do today, and so much of it is lost to history.”
