New York
Saul Steinberg, the charismatic founder of Reliance Group Holdings Inc. (a major privately held insurance conglomerate in New York) is selling eight important Dutch and Flemish paintings at Sotheby’s New York on 30 January. Mr Steinberg is famous in financial circles as a leading greenmailer, who made $325 million from the Walt Disney company after an attempted takeover in 1984. During the 1980s, he dispersed his excellent collection of German Expressionists at Christie’s to concentrate on Old Masters.
According to a friend of Mr Steinberg, a recent stroke has made him “rethink his priorities... I guess that pictures don’t mean as much to him as they once did”. Although Mr Steinberg had been a major supporter of the Metropolitan Museum, funding “the small exhibits and projects that many status-conscious donors shun”, according to 1985 profile in the magazine Manhattan Inc., his largesse failed to win him a coveted seat on the museum’s board of trustees. Among the works on offer are Rembrandt’s tiny (25cm x 17cm) grisaille study of “A bearded old man” of 1633 (est. $1.5-2 million), formerly in the collection of Andrew Mellon; Frans Hals’s gruff “Portrait of a bearded man with a book” (est. $500,000-700,000), a Terbruggen “Violin player” and an exceptionally beautiful “Landscape with Hagar at the well” (est. $300,000-400,000) by Bartholomeus Breenbergh.
