There’s New Money in Old Masters
By Margaret Carrigan
A version of this article originally appeared in The Back Room, our lively recap funneling only the week’s must-know art industry intel into a nimble read you’ll actually enjoy. Artnet News Pro members get exclusive access—subscribe now to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.
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Christie’s and Sotheby’s brought in £76.7 million ($101.6 million) across their Classics evening sales this week, a respectable 9.4 percent rise on the same auctions last year. That follows a $560 million week of modern and contemporary auctions that felt like a breath of fresh air after years of shrinking sales in the U.K. capital.
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But what’s fueling these two segments differs. If top-end market recovery is defining sales on the modern and contemporary side, discovery among a flush new collector base is driving results in Old Masters. Sotheby’s, for one, reported roughly 20 percent of buyers at its Old Masters evening sale were new to the auction house and nearly a quarter of the lots sold were purchased by collectors new to the field. Christie’s did not provide a specific stat but a spokesperson noted “new bidders and buyers across the sales on Tuesday.”
Who are they? The belief used to be that tech’s newly minted millionaires and billionaires could be lured into the art market with contemporary, tech-flavored offerings. The pop of the NFT bubble disproved that—or at least showed that digital art alone isn’t enough to keep them buying. But this week’s sales suggest that they’re still in the game.
Georgina Hilton auctions works at Christie’s. Courtesy of Christie’s.
“There’s a new breed of collectors from a zeroes-and-ones background that want to focus on the classics,” advisor Evan Beard told me. Though his firm typically focuses on modern and postwar art, he’s been edging into Old Masters, including at Christie’s £38.9 million ($51.4 million) evening sale on Tuesday, where he guaranteed some works and chased others.
The Old Masters category remains extremely sensitive to supply. Compared to other segments, there are just fewer quality historical works knocking around on the market. Many have made it into institutional collections, and others have been lost to time. That means there’s often a big demand differential between the best and the rest.
There was certainly plenty of demand for top-tier works at Christie’s on Tuesday night, where six records were set, including back-to-back records for Dutch Golden Age painter Jan van Huysum. His undated still life of peaches, grapes, and other fruit sold for £6.52 million ($8.65 million), against a £3 million–£4 million estimate. Its companion piece, a floral bouquet from 1734, brought £5.54 million ($7.35 million), well above its £2.5 million–£3.5 million estimate.
Beard, who was bidding on these lots, said they are “magical” still lifes, better than some Van Huysums in major museums. “These kinds of works bring out what I call ‘non-economic buyers,’ or those who are looking to fill a very specific gap in their collection,” he said.
Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux’s “The Laocoön and his Sons.” Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
But other bidding battles were surprising, in Beard’s view. An 1817 Laocoön bronze at Sotheby’s on Wednesday went for £13.6 million ($18.1 million), leaving its £2 million low estimate in the dust to become the most expensive Neoclassical sculpture ever sold at auction. “There were likely museums in the mix, but whoever chased that up saw a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” Beard said.
A few other lots not typically seen as premium material performed well, I’d wager due to their aesthetic allure. Take the whimsical 17th-century Flemish school copper panels depicting the seven days of creation, which were sold at Sotheby’s for £768,000 ($1 million)—540 percent more than their low estimate. Or the 17th-century memento mori painting of two skulls and a quill, which sold at Christie’s for £431,800 ($577,400), 440 percent over its low estimate. It’s rare for an unauthored work—this one attributed only to the Dutch school—to incite that kind of bidding.
Dutch School, wo Skulls with a Quill and Paper on a Marble Ledge (17th century). Courtesy of Christie’s.
“I can see the skull painting very at home in a collection with some Richters in it,” Beard said.
There’s a hunger among new, cross-category buyers for works that feel contemporary, regardless of age. I can see why: Amid rapid, destabilizing technological change, visualizing the creation of a new world and meditating on our inescapable mortality seem pretty apropos.
This article was originally published by Artnet News.