CHRISTIE’S NEW YORK IMPORTANT OLD MASTER PAINTINGS SALE TOTALS $57.5 MILLION Today’s auction of Important Old Master Pictures at Christie’s New York realized $57,521,800. Offering a broad selection of Spanish, Italian, English and Dutch masterworks & restituted pictures .
News-Antique.com - Apr 19,2007 - CHRISTIE’S NEW YORK IMPORTANT OLD MASTER PAINTINGS SALE TOTALS $57.5 MILLION
Kimbell Art Museum Buys Back Restituted Turner Masterpiece
Bellotto Venetian View Fetches $11 Million
Part One Of The Goudstikker Collection Realizes $9.7 Million
Important Old Master Paintings
April 19, 2007
New York – Today’s auction of Important Old Master Pictures at Christie’s New York realized $57,521,800. Offering a broad selection of Spanish, Italian, English and Dutch masterworks, restituted pictures played a major thematic role in the day’s proceedings, with the Goudstikker Collection and a late Turner oil painting attracting much pre-sale attention.
Nicholas Hall and Richard Knight, International Directors of Christie’s Old Masters, say: “From the top ten selling lots of the day, seven set new world auction records. It was extremely gratifying to see the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth buy back Turner’s late masterpiece, Glaucus and Scylla, and the sequence of Goudstikker sales got off to a very good start with a number of the paintings reaching record levels. The success of the sale further confirms our commitment to a more balanced international sales calendar.”
Glaucus and Scylla, a magnificent oil on panel by J.M.W. Turner, had been restituted to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffé by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas last year. During the morning session at Christie’s Rockefeller Galleries, Richard Feigen successfully bid $6.42 million on the lot to buy it back for the Kimbell Museum.
Part One of the Goudstikker Collection, arguably the most important collection of Old Master pictures ever restituted, featured 45 lots and totaled $9,741,200. Ferry Boat with cattle on the River Vecht near Nijenrode by Salomon van Ruysdael, in perfect condition and the definitive highlight of Part One, sold for $2,280,000. Further works from the Collection will be offered at Christie's in London on 5 July 2007 and in Amsterdam on 14 November 2007.
Marei von Saher, heir to the Goudstikker Collection, said at the sale today, “We are very pleased with the sale of Part 1 of the Goudstikker Collection and now look forward to Parts 2 and 3 in July and November in London and Amsterdam, respectively. We are also pleased to now create an international exhibition of selected family works which will showcase the legacy of Jacques Goudstikker. It is appropriate that more than 30 of the Goudstikker works restituted to our family have sold at Christie's and will now be appreciated by the public."
The top lot of the auction was The Grand Canal at the Church of San Stae, Venice by Bernardo Bellotto (1721-1780), an impressive work painted by Canaletto’s nephew when he was a teenager. It sold for $11,016,000.
Another notable top lot was The Madonna and Child in a landscape by Giovanni Battista Cima. This extraordinary Venetian Renaissance work exceeded pre-sale expectations, realizing $3,400,000. And the vendors of last year’s $35.9 million Turner view of Venice offered Gamblers at the Ridotto by Johann Heinrich Tischbein, bought by Galerie Neuse for a remarkable $2,504,000 million.
