As part of the winter version of London Art Week, which takes place twice a year and attracts dealers with special exhibitions, the two big auction houses compete head-to-head with John Constable at the old master auctions at the end of the year.
Gina Thomas
Features correspondent based in London.
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In the “Old Masters Evening Sale” on December 8th, Sotheby's is offering a recently resurfaced sketch for the motif of Glebe Farm, which the artist has tackled several times and where his mentor and patron John Fisher, later Bishop of Salisbury, lived. Research has long suspected that a work sold from the studio estate was missing from the sequence of images. She believes she found it in the study for one of the compositions painted in memory of Fisher, who died in 1825. It was launched in Cincinnati last year, estimated at $ 1,000,000 for a copy, valued at $ 43,000. Now Sotheby's is praising the study for one of the pictures to which Constable attached his "modest claims to futility",as one of the most significant discoveries of modern constable research at an estimate of up to five million pounds.
As early as December 7th, Christie's countered in its Old Masters evening auction with a light, slightly earlier oil sketch by Constable for one of the versions of Salisbury Cathedral, which Fisher commissioned from his friend. The bishop's daughter had requested a representation of the cathedral as a wedding present. The sketch, which is up for auction for the first time and is valued at up to three million pounds, still shows the traces of the pencil grid that the artist drew on the primer in order to transfer the motif from an original.
The two lots are examples of the free, more broken style of painting that aroused astonishment during Constable's lifetime, but now, as the revealing exhibition of his late work at the Royal Academy shows, is what makes up what modern painters like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach look to when it comes to close observation and appreciate the English scenery blending in with the imagination. With a view to possible Chinese interest, Christie's advises that the large, late view of Salisbury Cathedral can be seen from a different angle at the moment with other loans from the Tate in Shanghai.
One of the highlights of the 48 lots in the evening auction at Christie's is the intimate painting by the French caravaggist Vincent de Boulogne with the dream of Saint Joseph holding the curved ax of his craft, which is valued at up to 1.8 million pounds. An early portrait of El Greco (estimate 800,000 to 1.2 million pounds), which was still completely under the influence of Venetian painting, belongs to three pictures at Christie's that were restituted to the heirs of the Viennese couple Julius and Camilla Priester.
Sotheby's has included a smaller, finer selection of 36 works in the evening auction.
Outstanding among them are two gorgeous still lifes with flowers by the Dutch baroque painter Rachel Ruysch, who despite old age is still at the height of her creativity, as the estimates of up to 1.8 million pounds underline.
The top lot with an estimate of four to six million pounds is the portraits of the Antwerp notary Jacob de Witte and his wife Maria Nutius, in which Anton von Dyck triumphs with an abundance of black tones immediately after his return from Italy.