Turner painting bought last year for £500 sells for almost £2m at Sotheby's

For a flat market, the mood at this week’s Old Master auctions in London has been surprisingly upbeat. But then this capricious sector, which is defined by issues of dwindling supply, and better insulated from the kneejerk shock of wider economic fluctuations than the contemporary art market, has always danced to its own tune.

Indeed, the £11.5m total (£14.5m with fees) for Sotheby’s Old Master paintings auction on Wednesday night (2 July) may seem paltry for an evening sale today, but active bidding in the room and on the phone resulted in 81% of the 31 lots offered finding buyers—a healthy figure for an Old Master sale.

Sotheby's secured three lots with third-party guarantees, compared with the 12 works that were pre-sold through guarantees at Christie's the night before (1 July), where a record-breaking £31.9m Canaletto resulted in a yawning gap between the two totals—Christie’s totted up £46.2m (£55.2m with fees) from 39 lots. Sotheby’s total was up from the equivalent sale in July 2024, which posted £12.4m (with fees), but hugely down from the £39.4m (with fees) 49-lot evening auction in July 2023.

Despite the lack of a headline lot—and nothing selling for over £2.2m hammer—Sotheby’s auction was peppered with intriguing works that exceeded their estimates. The first lot, a rediscovered early 14th-century Byzantine panel depicting The Hodegetria Mother of God, got the sale off to a rapid start, selling for £650,000 (£825,500 with fees), several times its £160,000 to £200,000 estimate. Such panels are desirable and rarely available, and this one was competed by six bidders in the room, online and on the phone before selling to a buyer on the phone with Reto Barmettler, Sotheby’s Russian pictures consultant.

“This one in particular was very early in date, early 14th century, around 1300—that's about as early as we get in Old Masters,” says Elisabeth Lobkowicz, the director and head of sales in Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department. “The other thing about icons is that—because they are held, they're touched, they're carried around—to have one survive in such condition is rare, usually details are completely lost.”

Three new artist records were set, including for the Florentine Renaissance painter Lorenzo di Credi, a pupil of Andrea del Verrocchio. Di Credi’s full-length depiction of Saint Quirinus of Neuss sold for £2.2m (£2.7m with fees), against an estimate of £2m to £3m, the top lot of the sale. Saint Quirinus is a little depicted Roman martyr who refused to execute three Christians, after he saw them performing miracles, and was punished by having his limbs cut off one by one. The intensely hued painting, which had been owned by the Rothschild family between the late 19th century and 1939, resurfaced at a Sotheby’s auction in New York in 1995, having been known only from a black and white photograph. In 1995, it sold for $1.2m (with fees, then £989,062), which until last night was a record for the artist.

“With its vibrant colours and this sculptural figure set against a dark background, it’s a very appealing image overall,” Lobkowicz says. “And it's quintessential Florence, the same magical moment as Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci—Di Credi was working alongside Leonardo, I believe, in Verrocchio’s workshop.” Lobkowicz adds that there is a particular appetite for Florentine paintings at the moment, pointing to Sandro Botticelli’s The Virgin and Child enthroned which sold at Sotheby’s in December for £10m (with fees).

A record was also set for the Dutch-born, France-based portrait painter Corneille de Lyon, whose enigmatic Portrait of a merchant, traditionally identified as Theodore Beza (1519-1605), sold for £680,000 (£863,600 with fees) against an estimate of £300,000 to £400,000. The painting narrowly beat its own record, set when it last sold at auction at Christie’s in 2016, for £665,000 (with fees).

The third record of the night was for the little-known 17th century Neopolitan painter Diana de Rosa (1602-1643), whose Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist sold in the room to the dealer Robert Simon for £250,000 (£317,500 with fees), more than four times the £60,000 to £80,000 estimate. The early Baroque work, unpublished and previously unknown until it was brought to Sotheby’s, had been in the same Italian collection since 1950.

Successful in her own lifetime, de Rosa was a contemporary of Artemisia Gentileschi and would have known her work in Naples, Lobkowicz says: “Very few works are known by her, although I think probably after this type of success, more attention will be placed on her, and more works might come to light.” The work was attributed to De Rosa by the professor Riccardo Lattuada, who dated it to 1635, while another academic, Giuseppe Porzio, suggested the painting might be a collaboration between Filippo Vitale and a young De Rosa from the early 1620s.

There was also a Gentileschi in the sale, the monumental David with the head of Goliath, thought to date to the late 1630s when the artist was in London. The painting was consigned by a UK private collector who made a good buy—they purchased it at Hampel Fine Art Auctions in Munich for €104,000 in 2018. Then it was initially catalogued as being by a 17th-century painter of the school of Caravaggio, before its attribution was changed online to Gentileschi just before the sale. When the painting turned up at Hampel, Lobkowicz says, it was so dirty that the bold signature on the sword was concealed. On Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, it sold for a mid-estimate £1.6m (£2m with fees).

But not all the works by female artists fared well—an arresting painting by Clara Peeters, catalogued as a “presumed self-portrait”, failed to find a buyer—perhaps the £1.2m to £1.8m estimate proved too steep.

The star of the British pictures was The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent's Rock, Bristol (1792), the first oil painting ever exhibited by J.M.W. Turner, when he was 17 years old in 1793.

The painting had been hidden in a private collection for over 150 years, since it was sold at Christie’s in 1864, until it appeared last year at Dreweatts auctioneers in Newbury, where it was attributed to a follower of Julius Caesar Ibbetson and titled House by the Water in a Stormy Sky. Then it sold for just £524.80 (with fees). Whichever canny buyer bought it made a tidy profit—on Wednesday, it sold to a UK private collector for £1.5m (£1.9m with fees), way above an estimate of £200,000 to £300,000.

“I have to say, even we were taken aback at just quite how positive the response was, it really was extraordinary, with five active bidders, two in the room, one absentee bid on the book, and then a telephone bidder who ended up winning the lot,” says Julian Gascoigne, a director of Sotheby's Early British paintings department.

A mention in dispatches for the evocatively titled Shock Dog by the 18th century sculptor Anne Seymour Damer, which doubled its estimate to sell for £635,000 (with fees), a record for the artist, during yesterday’s Master Sculpture from Four Millennia day sale.

Damer, whose godfather was Horace Walpole (he left her the London Gothic Revival villa Strawberry Hill after his death in 1797), made a name for herself sculpting pet dogs and particularly lap dogs, which were in vogue in the 18th century. Shock Dog, so called because of its “shocks” of hair, is a prime—and no doubt utterly indulged—example of such a creature.

This bundle of tousled terracotta, dating to 1795, is one of only two works in this medium by Damer known to have survived, and was passed down by descent through her family. According to a knowledgeable source, it sold to an American collector, although Sotheby’s declines to comment. A marble version of Shock Dog is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, possibly carved from this terracotta model.

Finally, across New Bond Street at Bonhams on Wednesday night, George Gower’s striking Portrait of Sir Edward Monins of Waldershare (1575) achieved £880,000 (£1.1m with fees), more than quadruple its estimate of £200,00 to £300,000.

A prime example of Elizabethan portraiture, rich with iconography, it depicts a newly knighted Monins, all ruff, ostrich feather and gold and black doublet. Monins would have been around 25 when it was painted and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I—as was Gower, who famously painted the Plimpton Sieve Portrait of the Queen four years later.

As with many works to have sold well this week, the Monins portrait is, despite its age, idiosyncratic and strikingly modern—gone are the days of wall-to-wall Dutch still lifes.

“This was a truly exceptional work that had never before been offered at auction, having remained in the family’s collection since it was painted,” Lisa Greaves, the head of department for Old Master paintings at Bonhams, tells The Art Newspaper. “The amazing result demonstrations the power of such great provenance, with the portrait in high demand before the auction. It was eventually bought by a private collector, and will be staying in the UK.”