The last six-footer sketch by John Constable in private hands will be the “pivotal painting” in Christie’s 250th anniversary Defining British Art sale on 30 June, says Christie’s global president Jussi Pylkkänen.
View on the River Stour near Dedham, full-scale sketch (around 1821-22) is estimated in the region of £12m-£16m and was the study for the fourth in his series of six “finished” canvases of the Stour valley exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1819 and 1825.
For the past 20 years, the oil on canvas has been in the collection of “a lady” who acquired it privately in 1995. Pylkkänen said “it has been here [in the UK] ever since” Christie’s sold it in 1883 for 1190 guineas, although it has been exhibited internationally.
“There was a moment when this six footer would come up for sale” and the vendor was “inspired to sell” by the sale’s theme says Pylkkänen: “No Constable would normally get the chance to be sold against a Freud and a Bacon.”
“Incongruous” art values make estimating tricky but Christie’s 2012 sale of The Lock, the last finished canvas from this series in private hands, for a record £20m (£22.4m with premium) set some precedent, Pylkkänen says.
He thinks an institutional buyer is likely, possibly The Huntington Library in California where the finished canvas hangs. Although it is “unlikely a UK institution would reach for it”, Pylkkänen says that “with any painting sold in the UK, its export could be stopped and the money found.”
British and US interest is a given but Pylkkänen says: “It could go to the Pushkin Museum, any Russian buyer, the Middle East or Far East. Anyone; it’s the origins of Modernism.”
