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Portrait of a lady leads a stampede at £14.8m winter sale of Old Masters £14.98 winter sale
GODFREY BARKER ART SALES CORRESPONDENT3 Dec 2008
London's £14.8 million winter sale of Important Old Master Paintings shrugged off the credit crunch with a "situation normal" sign posted at Christie's in St James's.
There was no repeat of the bloodbath witnessed in New York last month of impressionist, contemporary art and modern pictures.
Art's astonishing rise of 2005-08 was dramatically halted with a 20 per cent price fall for works from Monet to Warhol and from Picasso to Damien Hirst. Only 10 per cent of lots made their estimates. Pundits declared art to be a bubble that had burst.
However, Old Masters sold last night as if no economic slump had happened.
In an auction topped by a £3,849,250 Canaletto view of The Grand Canal from the Ca' Corner, sold from the 250-year-old family collection of Viscount Hampden at Glynde Place, near Lewes, four-fifths of the lots found buyers.
A majority was sold at estimates set in the economic sunshine of last summer before the world fell apart.
Heavy money also fell on Tiepolo's Portrait of a Lady as Flora, which was found this year in the attic of a French chateau - hidden there by Victorian ancestors shocked at its nudity. It was seemingly untouched under promising layers of dirt.
Christie's pre-sale expectation of £700,000 to £900,000 was ignored in a stampede by nine bidders which trebled the price to £2,841,250. In all, a quarter of the lots sold over high estimates.
Unsold, however, was Viscount Hampden's other Canaletto, a small but minutely detailed View of the Piazzetta with the Liberia, painted with the camera obscura.
It asked £4-6 million to the general horror of Mayfair and St James's Old Master dealers who lamented its lack of water and perspective and was knocked down unsold with a highest bid of £3.8 million. Its failure left the "sold by value" portion of the sale at 71 per cent.
"That estimate was a very strong sum even by the highest expectations of the boom years," said Simon Dickinson in unity with Richard Green, Britain's two top Old Master dealers by sales.
Nick Hall, Christie's Old Master expert, responded that Lord Hampden "did not mind if the picture sold or not" as the family had made a useful £6 million this year in selling Rubens' sketch of The Banqueting House, Whitehall to Tate Britain "and did not need the money".
A tale of two art markets is emerging in talk in Bond Street - one bought by collectors which is without serious problems, another inflated by speculators which has fallen sharply.
Dealers noted that the Old Masters' night at Christie's was preceded by successful November auctions with up to 99 per cent sold of Victorian paintings, Georgian furniture and silver, Chinese ceramics, fine wines, Fabergé, Islamic and Tribal art, Art Nouveau and Art Deco and Natural History, all sectors of the art business where financial game-playing is by and large unknown.
"Tonight was an entirely normal performance," said Richard Knight, Christie's head of Old Masters.
