Displaying items by tag: old masters week

Christie’s Old Masters Week, which took place in New York from January 28 through January 30, garnered $68 million. The top lot was ‘The Rothschild Prayerbook,’ a masterpiece from the Flemish Renaissance that sold for $13.6 million, a record for an illuminated manuscript at auction.

‘The Rothschild Prayerbook’ is comprised of lavish and intricate illustrations by the most celebrated court artists of the Renaissance, including Gerard Horenbout and Alexander Bening. The book was most likely made around 1505 for someone connected to the imperial court in the Netherlands. Kay Sutton, the Director of Books and Manuscripts at Christie’s, said, “The Rothschild Prayerbook is a fabulous work of art and it has been an enormous pleasure and honour for us to be able to show it so widely and to such universal admiration -- an admiration recognized by the price it achieved at auction.”

Other highlights from Christie’s Old Masters Week included Francisco de Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’, a set of 80 etchings that sold for $1.4 million; Tiepolo’s ‘I Cani Sapienti,’ which garnered $3.6 million, a record for a single work by the artist at auction; and a drawing by Peter Paul Rubens titled ‘Saint Ildefonso receiving the Chasuble from the Virgin,’ which netted $233,000.

Thanks to the keen eyes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curators, the institution snapped up an important Old Master drawing at an auction at Swann Galleries for $840 (with premium). The auction, which took place on January 29, 2013, was part of the highly anticipated Old Masters Week in New York.

The drawing was described in the auction catalogue as being from the early 19^th century and of French origin. An illustration in brush, black ink, and gray wash of Socrates dying, the drawing was said to be modeled after Jacques-Louis David’s (1748-1825) painting The Death of Socrates, a work that resides in the Met’s permanent collection. The original painting by David was acquired by the museum in 1931 and is among the artist’s greatest works.

As it turns out, the alleged copy, which was given an estimated selling price of $500-$700, was a previously unrecorded preliminary compositional study for David’s painting. Along with the painting, the Met owns a well-developed chalk drawing of The Death of Socrates, which helped the Met’s curators to authenticate the compositional drawing despite differences in setting, positions, and gestures of the figures featured in the painting.

The drawing was acquired by the museum via Katrin Bellinger, a frequent agent for the institution.