Sotheby’s reopens its galleries at 34 to 35 New Bond Street in London for its winter series of Old Master and Treasures sales, with a pre-sale exhibition opening 5 December 2020 of 700 artworks spanning 800 years, from paintings and prints to sculpture and drawings. Two paintings from the firm’s late-January 2021 Old Masters sale in New York will also be shown: Sandro Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Roundel, estimated in excess of $80 million, and Rembrandt’s Abraham and the Angels (est. $20 million to $30 million), a small panel of 1646 that last sold at auction in London in 1848 for £64.
The Old Masters Evening Sale on 10 December offers a strong group of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings. David Teniers the Younger’s The Wine Harvest, from the collection of the Viscounts Gage, comes to market for the first time in well over 200 years (est. £3,000,000 to £5,000,000). The sale includes two early works by Jacob van Ruisdael, among them Landscape with a cottage and stone bridge under a cloudy sky (est. £800,000 to £1,200,000), a river landscape by Jan van Goyen, and Jan Steen’s The Dancing Couple (est. £1,000,000 to £1,500,000).
British portraits from the 16th to the 19th centuries feature masters including Sir Thomas Lawrence, Hans Eworth, whose portrait of Joan Thornbury (est. £400,000 to £600,000) carries an unusual memento mori, Sir Peter Lely, and Pompeo Batoni, whose portrait of Thomas Orde on the Grand Tour is estimated at £300,000 to £400,000.
The annual Treasures sale on 10 December, now in its eleventh edition, includes a Regency bookcase from Devonshire House with a concealed door and a Fabergé gold-mounted nephrite desk set formerly owned by the King of Egypt. A separate single-owner sale, A Treasury of Vertu, offers 37 gold boxes, while the second edition of STONE (2 to 11 December) is devoted to marble, hardstones and micromosaics, with a late 16th-century Roman inlaid top among the highlights (est. £70,000 to £100,000).
The Old Master Sculpture and Works of Art sale (24 November to 5 December) is led by Willem Danielsz. van Tetrode’s bronze Neoptolemus and Astyanax (est. £400,000 to £600,000). Several lots have been returned to the heirs of Jewish collectors whose collections were seized by the Nazi regime, including works formerly owned by Jakob Goldschmidt, among them a Renaissance relief attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini (est. £40,000 to £60,000), and a rare Romanesque situla of the first half of the 12th century (est. £30,000 to £50,000).
Further sales include Small Wonders: Early Gems and Jewels (10 to 16 December), distinguished by a 13th-century cameo of the ascension of the prophet Elijah, previously recorded in the Imperial Treasury of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors (est. £120,000 to £180,000), and an inaugural Old Master Prints sale (26 November to 7 December) featuring works by Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius and Rembrandt. Dürer’s largest engraving, St Eustace of 1501, is estimated at £300,000 to £500,000.
(Press Release)
