Two weeks ago, in the New York Times, Scott Reyburn made the pronouncement that “the art market, like pretty much everything else in our culture, has become all about the here and now”—a nod to how contemporary artists have overtaken the once-fashionable Old Masters on the auction block. Sotheby’s Old Masters sales this week did little to counter that statement, bringing in a modest $74.5 million (or $89.5 million with fees) this week.
But their sales did include a few surprises, including a new public auction record for Bronzino, a successful haul for an Anthony Van Dyck painting that had been discovered in a farm shed, and works by female Old Masters that over-performed.
Below, a look at five works that sold in the sales.
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Peter Paul Rubens, Head of Saint John the Baptist Presented to Salome (1609)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby's Sold for: $26.9 million
The top work sold at Sotheby’s this week was this Peter Paul Rubens painting, which is now the third-most expensive one by him ever sold publicly at auction. (His record, set in 2002, stands at $76.5 million.) The painting sold toward the lower end of its estimate, and had come to sale with an irrevocable bid, meaning that its sale was certain ahead of the auction; its final price reflects the buyer’s premium counted in.
Part of an auction for works from the Fisch Davidson collection, the painting was made after Rubens left in Italy in 1608 and, according to Sotheby’s, evinces influence from paintings by artists like Tintoretto and Titian, whose work he had encountered abroad. It depicts a biblical episode in which Saint John the Baptist has been beheaded for publicly denouncing the marriage of King Herod to his brother’s wife as being illegal.
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Bronzino, Portrait of A Man, Facing Left, With A Quill and a Sheet of Paper (ca. 1527)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby's Sold for: $10.7 million
The big story out of Sotheby’s Old Masters sales this week was the sale of this Bronzino painting, which more than doubled its high estimate, selling for a final price of $10.7 million—a record for the famed Renaissance portraitist. Initially, experts with the house had thought the work was by Jacopino del Conte, a far less famous artist; its new attribution certainly helped the work achieve the price it did. Even with that new attribution, however, there remains more research to be done, as scholar Carlo Falciani has averred that the sitter may represent Bronzino himself.
The painting had come to auction after being restituted by the German government to the heirs of the Munich-based Jewish art collector Isle Hesselberger, who have earmarked the sale’s proceeds to support Jewish causes and medical aid in New York.
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Anthony van Dyck, A Study for Saint Jerome (1615–18)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby's Sold for: $3.08 million
Just over 20 years ago, this painting was found in a farm shed in Kinderhook, New York, its back reportedly streaked with bird poop. A local collector, Albert B. Roberts, had bought the painting for $600. That sum has now multiplied 5,125 times over. At Sotheby’s, the painting sold for $3.08 million. Although that number may seem like a lot for a work that may have once had fecal matter on it, it’s actually only just above the high estimate given to it by Sotheby’s. (It was also sold with an irrevocable bid.)
Thought to be a sketch for another painting of Saint Jerome in the collection of the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, this van Dyck was not properly authenticated until 2019. Now that the artist has been credited as its creator, scholars have dated it to the period when van Dyck was an apprentice in Peter Paul Rubens’s studio. It had come to auction from the estate of Roberts, who died in 2021.
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Anne Vallayer-Coster, Still life of roses in a glass vase, with grapes beside
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby's Sold for: $630,000
In the past few decades, there has been an increase in interest among collectors and institutions in female Old Masters, from well-known ones like Artemisia Gentileschi and Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun to more obscure figures like Sofonisba Anguissola and Sarah Miriam Peale. The latest artist to fit within that trend, it seems, is Anne Vallayer-Coster, an 18th-century French painter known for her still lifes.
While the result for this painting may pale in comparison to her $1.84 million record set last year, the $630,000 netted for it this week is a solid result, considering that it’s more than three times the work’s somewhat conservative high estimate. Although Sotheby’s did not identify whose collection the work had come from, it is known that this Vallayer-Coster was once owned by Louis Cournerie, a French miniaturist active during the 19th century.
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Anna Dorothea Therbusch, A scientist seated at a desk by candlelight (1766–68)
Image Credit: Courtesy Sotheby's Sold for: $441,000
Anna Dorothea Therbusch may have little name recognition outside Germany, the country where she worked during the 18th century, but that’s slowly changing, thanks in part to a 2021 show of her work that was held at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Therbusch’s path to art-making was an unusual one, despite her father, Georg Lisiewsky, was himself a court painter who ended up also acting as her teaching. She didn’t end up becoming a full-time artist until she was in her 40s, however, and went on to become one of the few female attendees during her era at Paris’s Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and a portraitist with a good deal of clout in her home country.
Using the theatrical lighting styles being put forward at the time by Caravaggist painters, she painted this image of a scientist who is illuminated only by a candle on a desk before him. It wasn’t authenticated as a Therbusch until 1996, and at the Sotheby’s auction this week, it was snapped up by the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio.