There’s a pleasant fantasy, held even by those who should know better, that goes something like this: You’re on a day trip in the country, and you happen across a little auction being held in a tent in a quaint village. A small painting that attracts you is being offered, and you purchase it for a nominal sum. A few years later, Antiques Roadshow comes to your city, and on impulse you take your painting for examination by their expert. She takes one look at your painting, gasps in disbelief, and stammers, “Why, it’s a long-lost masterpiece by Michelangelo! You’re rich beyond your wildest dreams!” I call this a fantasy because it ain’t gonna happen. In the first place, the attics of begone days are largely empty, and in the second place, any venue, including a tag sale, will be quickly scanned by “pickers,” people who closely follow such things and who know what they’re looking at. Your chances of finding a lost masterpiece are approximately those of finding a real 5-carat diamond on the tray of costume jewelry at a rummage sale. You’ll be far better off working with a dealer you trust and paying a fair price for a good painting. Nevertheless, people continue to dream. I once knew a collector I’ll call Bill. I say he was a collector because I think he had once or twice plunked money down for a painting, but he was forever worrying about paying too much for a work of art. Several times, when I showed him a painting, Bill would tell me that he’d had the opportunity to buy...
As a private dealer, I sell works of art for clients, but if a client has a painting that isn’t a 19th or 20th century American work, my list of prospective collectors for the painting will be limited, and in such cases I often recommend that the client send the work to auction. I then become the client’s representative with the auction houses, getting estimates to compare, providing independent advice on which auction house to choose, and then helping with shipping and other administrative matters in the months before the sale. I recently helped place this painting in next month’s Impressionist and Modern Sale at Sotheby’s. It’s by Eugene Boudin (1824-1898). Boudin was the son of a harbor pilot in Normandy and spent a lot of time on ships as a boy. When his father left the sea in 1835 to open a shop selling stationery and picture frames in Le Havre, Boudin worked in the shop, meeting many artists who encouraged him. At the age of 22, he began to paint full time, specializing in scenes of the harbors he knew so well. This painting, Low Tide, Portrieux, was painted in 1875 at Portrieux, a harbor on the northern coast of Brittany. Paintings such as this one made Boudin one of the most celebrated marine artists in France. He exhibited at the Salon and was eventually made a Knight of the Legion of Honor. And here is where desire, the subject indicated by my title, comes into play. When a painting is offered at auction, an estimate must be set, and estimating what a work might bring is...
Two weeks ago, I was looking over the catalogues for the upcoming American auctions. I knew that this blog would be concerned with the auctions’ results, and I had already picked out a title for the post: “One Hopped, The Other Didn’t.” The paintings to be discussed were both by Edward Hopper, one of the great American artists of the 20th Century. Christie’s had what was probably the most important Hopper still in private hands, Chop Suey. The 1929 painting, a large, colorful scene of daily life in New York from the estate of the noted collector Barney Ebsworth, was an iconic piece, everything you could want in a Hopper. The estimate was $70-100 million, about double the previous record for a Hopper oil. Christie’s was on the money in its prediction: the painting was hammered down for $85 million. With the buyer’s premium, the final price was $91,875,000. Everyone knew that the bidding would be fast and furious for Chop Suey, but I had my doubts about the Hopper that was coming up at Sotheby’s three days later, even though it was approximately the same size as the record-breaking painting. Two Comedians was painted in 1966, the year before Hopper’s death. A man in his 80’s, he had been literally losing his touch; the later works seem cruder to me than the paintings done in middle age. Then there was the subject: two clowns taking a bow. While Hopper painted theatrical and burlesque scenes, they’re not what comes to mind when you think of his work. When Sotheby’s put an estimate of $12-18 million on Two Comedians, I...
Unless you’ve been living someplace without newspapers, TV, or Wi-Fi, you have doubtless heard about the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, discussed in this blog last January (Selling Mona Lisa), that sold for $450,312,500, including buyer’s premium, at Christie’s New York two weeks ago. Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who is suing the Swiss dealer who sold him this work for $127,500,000, alleging that the dealer overcharged him on several other deals, undoubtedly had the last laugh here. The sale was surrounded by controversy from the start. Was this a genuine Leonardo? Experts differed. If so, how much of the original painting remained? The work had been heavily restored. In the end, it didn’t matter. Christie’s put on a full court press in marketing the work, holding public viewings of it in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London, and New York. De-emphasizing the Christian theme (it is a portrait of Jesus, after all), Christie’s touted it as “the male Mona Lisa,” brilliantly linking it with what is arguably the most famous painting in the world. I witnessed some of the hoopla the New York exhibition generated as I arrived to view the American works coming up for sale at Christie’s that same week. I had to push my way past a long line of people who had waited 30 minutes to an hour for a look at the painting. The atmosphere reminded longtime New Yorkers of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, when Michelangelo’s Pietà was on display. Over 27 million people visited the Vatican Pavilion at the fair to stand on a moving walkway and be transported past the...
Earlier this month, I gave a lecture entitled “Appraising the Art of the American West” to a group from the Appraisers Association of America. I spoke about how to set valuations on artworks depicting the American West and its inhabitants by artists from the early 19th century until the present day, and I explained the various factors that make, say, one painting by Frederic Remington more valuable than another of equal size. One of the artists I discussed in my talk was Charles Bird King (1785-1862). Born in Newport, Rhode Island, King came to New York at the age of 15 to apprentice himself to Edward Savage, a now all-but-forgotten portrait painter. In 1806 King left for London to study with Benjamin West, a famous American painter who had settled there. Returning to America in 1812, King spent the next few years in various mid-Atlantic cities, making a living by painting portraits of politicians and other notables. By 1816, he was living in Washington, DC. King would be nothing but a footnote in American art history today had he not received a commission from the government in 1821 to paint the members of Native American delegations who were visiting Washington. For the next 20 years, he would paint portraits of tribal leaders as they arrived in town to be shafted yet again by the Great White Father. Those portraits aroused much interest when they were exhibited and later served as the basis for illustrated volumes which are still widely sought after by bibliophiles. In my talk, I emphasized that what often makes one of King’s portraits more popular, and...
In my last blog, I wrote about the results of the American auctions that had occurred in the previous week in New York. Among the lessons they taught, I said, was that the market for 19th century genre and still life paintings was “dead as a doornail.” Spoken too soon. A couple of weeks after that post, the still life below by William McCloskey came up at a Grogan & Company fine art and jewelry sale in Boston. Estimated at $80,000-150,000, it sold for $488,000, including premium. McCloskey (1859-1941) studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, taught briefly in Denver, and then moved to Los Angeles, at that time a sleepy provincial town with pretensions to culture. While he enjoyed an active career in California as a portrait painter, McCloskey would be unknown today except for the paintings he made of oranges and other fruit, which have proved perennial favorites over the years. In setting the estimate, Georgina Winthrop, the cataloguer at Grogan, was playing it safe. Although a similar McCloskey still life sold in New York for $782,500 in 2011, Ms. Winthrop obviously thought, as I did, that the current market for Victorian-era paintings was weak and that a conservative estimate was called for. Whether or not the low estimate and the non-New York venue encouraged collectors to think that they might get a steal, there was no stopping them once the bidding began. Six telephone bidders engaged in a bidding war, tripling the estimate. Initial reports had said that the buyers of the painting were a young couple from San Francisco who...
