Displaying items by tag: Auction

One of the first museums created for the enjoyment of the middle class was the Shakespeare Gallery, opened in 1789 by John Boydell. Each of its paintings depicted a different scene from a Shakespeare play, and the museum even had a shop on its lower level for purchasing souvenir prints. It closed in 1805, its collection of paintings dispersed through an auction, and its building at 52 Pall Mall was torn down in 1870.

A commercial statement filed in New York this summer has raised questions about the circumstances surrounding the sale of a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat at Christie’s, New York, on 13 May.

The work, The Field Next to the Other Road (1981), was consigned to the auction house by the dealer Tony Shafrazi and included in the Post-War and Contemporary evening sale where it sold for $37.1m, the sixth-highest price of the night.

Six years after selling off his art collection in a record-breaking "sale of the century", the French businessman and philanthropist Pierre Berge is now putting his renowned library under the hammer.

The lover and business partner of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent told AFP he is putting almost his entire collection up for auction, one of the most priceless in private hands.

In 2013, the US Attorney’s Office in Newark, New Jersey, filed an action seeking the forfeiture of a 2,000-strong collection of photographs valued at more than $15m. The works had been bought by Philip Rivkin, the owner of the Houston-based company Green Diesel, who this June pleaded guilty for his role in a massive biodiesel fraud scheme. The Attorney’s Office says the photographs were bought using the proceeds of the fraud, allegedly to launder the money.

The Lock, one of John Constable’s most famous compositions sold for £9,109,000 / €12,562,266 / $13,699,025 at Sotheby’s London, 160 years after its last appearance on the market. The monumental landscape depicting the countryside of the painter’s “careless boyhood” was the highlight of the Old Master & British Paintings Evening sale which featured a significant number of museum-quality works and totalled £22.6 million / €31.2 million / $34 Million (est. £21.8-32.6 million).

Next week, The Lock, one of John Constable’s most famous compositions will reappear on the market for the first time in 160 years. The monumental landscape - depicting the countryside of the painter’s “careless boyhood” - will lead Sotheby’s London Evening auction of Old Master & British Paintings on 9th December. The sale will be further distinguished by museum-quality works, an unusually large number of which are from private collections and come to the market for the first time in several generations.

The blue bloods are selling their jewels.

At Christie’s and Bonhams auctions in December, pearls formerly belonging to Queen Isabella II of Spain, and Kashmir sapphires from an European princess are going under the hammer.

The natural colored pearls (pictured below), headlining Christie’s Important Jewels auction on December 2 in London, were originally collected for Marie Christina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, wife of King Ferdinand VII and Queen Isabella II’s mother.

There was a silver lining to Wednesday’s otherwise disappointing Sotheby’s auction of American art from the Alfred A. Taubman collection: The sale led to a reunion of siblings.

“The Great Florida Sunset,” an 1887 landscape by Martin Johnson Heade, sold for $5.9 million — more than double the previous record for him, though less than the expected $7 million to $10 million.

The New York evening sales concluded tonight with the Impressionist and modern sale at Christie’s, which racked up $145.5 million, well above its low estimate of $108.8 million—a quite successful tally accrued during a slow, steady waltz through a list of 59 relatively low-priced lots. The almost complete lack of any sky-high estimates—only two lots had valuations that passed into eight figures—allowed attendees to raise their paddles early and often, and a solid 83 percent of the cautiously priced works found buyers.

The sale of the Warhols went ahead, and the works ended up as the two top-selling lots in a record-breaking auction, netting a combined $151.5 million and surpassing the pre-sale high estimate of a combined $128 million.

A year after the sale, almost to the day, the German paper FAZ reported that the proceeds were in fact used to pay off the state-owned casino's considerable debt despite previous denials. The German daily quotes WestSpiel's annual financial report that described the sale of the artworks as “an important step towards ensuring future viability."