At first glance, it looks as if Sotheby's has suffered a setback at its first real London old master auction since the beginning of the pandemic.

In accordance with the philosophy of the American managing director Charles Stewart of making the auction visit a special experience, around fifty customers were sitting at tables with a white setting in front of sandwiches and champagne, while auctioneer Harry Dalmeny struggled with one drop after the other to look happy.

Of 49 tickets, 21 unsold and the total of £ 14 million excluding premium was well below the £ 37 million Christie's grossed in 46 of 59 tickets sold.

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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One of the top lots, Anthony van Dyck's portrait of the grim Count Strafford, estimated at up to five million pounds, one of Charles I's closest comrades in the Civil War, which has been in the possession of the Dukes of Grafton since the 17th century, was not there For reasons stated, it had been removed from the auction by the client, although it had been specially restored for this purpose. Nevertheless, Christie's had not only the more extensive, but also the much more interesting offer with works fresh from the market by big names such as Bellotto, Frans van Mieris, Georges de La Tour, Artemisia Gentileschi and Johann Zoffany. On the one hand, this is due to the house's traditional ties to long-established British families, but it was also due to the fact that Christie's had kept its powder dry,by foregoing the usual New York old master auction in January, unlike Sotheby's. The travel restrictions, which made the acquisition of orders just as difficult as the viewing, which was very necessary for old masters, were particularly serious at Sotheby's.

A closer look, however, shows that Christie's did not do quite as well and Sotheby's did not do quite as badly as the overall results initially lead us to believe. At Christie's, a number of paintings exceeded expectations and even set new records, above all the exquisite little music lesson by Frans van Mieris, which has resurfaced from an English private collection after almost a century. The panel painting, valued at up to a million pounds, climbed to 2.9 million pounds. Artemisia Gentileschi's lovely reclining Venus in a tender embrace with Cupid also achieved almost twice as much as estimated at two million pounds. This also applies to the haunting portrait of a woman by Ferdinand Bol from an old Scottish collection, which was sold for £ 980,000.

As with Leonardo's silver pencil drawing with the bear's head, which Christie's had assigned to the "Exceptional Sale" - which ranges from a piece of meteor to various artefacts - in the hope of new buyers, several of the top lots attracted only one bid that just reached the lower estimate or below. A New York private collector was able to secure the magnificent view of Verona with the Ponte delle Navi by the young Bernardo Bellotto for nine million pounds. When the vedute was last launched in 1971, it fetched £ 300,000.

Saint Andrew from the series of the Albi Apostles by Georges de La Tour, one of the few paintings by the French Caravaggist still in private hands, found a buyer at 3.7 million pounds, also below the estimate: he nevertheless overtook that in December 2020 at Lempertz in Cologne with the girl blowing in a brazier. For the theater scene of the Frankfurt-born Johann Zoffany, which is awarded up to 1.5 million pounds and portrays the famous actor David Garrick with two colleagues, the hammer fell at 850,000 pounds. The two paintings restituted by the descendants of the Amsterdam entrepreneur Jacob Lievens were also auctioned at the lower estimate. The lush still life by Jan Davidsz. de Heem, which was awarded up to five million, brought in 2.6 million pounds.The Frans Hals Museum placed the successful bid for the funny company of Dirck Hals, Frans' younger brother, and Dirck van Delen, which they had kept as a long-term loan, for 600,000 pounds.

Because of the high proportion of early Dutch paintings, Sotheby's was particularly affected by the weaker demand for this division, which Christie's also felt. Despite the sad decline rate, many of the lots sold exceeded their upper estimate and, like the record results for Samuel Palmer's monochrome moonlight drawing at 1.3 million and Hans Hoffmann's wonderful rabbit on parchment at 1.02 million pounds, refuted the prophecies of doom on the old masters' market. This is due not least to the increased interest of Asian bidders, who this year accounted for a third of the bids in the sector in terms of value. The tremendous encouragement for a grotesque fool attributed to Quentin Massys that five bidders fought over before increasing his estimate tenfold to £ 420,000,testifies to the need for new buyers for strong motifs. The top lot, an early seascape by William Turner, which was last for sale in 1945, came to the lower limit of the estimate at four million pounds. The family portrait of Anthony van Dyck, painted with spirited brushstrokes, which had not been on the market since 1945 and was estimated at up to 1.5 million pounds, brought it to two million pounds.