Well, if you had three luxurious homes, a 125-foot yacht, and an art collection reportedly worth about $1 billion, what would you sell to raise a little cash?
Depends on whom you ask.If you ask Baroness Carmen ‘Tita’ Thyssen-Bornemisza, the answer is John Constable’s The Lock.
If you ask Norman Rosenthal, former exhibitions director of the Royal Academy, it’s anything else. On Friday, he quit the board of the Baroness’s museum in Madrid to protest the sale.
The Baroness decided earlier this year that she can live without one of Constable’s most famous paintings and it’s up for sale at Christie’s on Tuesday. Presale estimate?  £20-25 million or about $30- $40 million. The Lock “is one of a celebrated series of six large-scale canvases that also includes “The Hay Wain”, arguably his most famous work that hangs in Britain’s National Gallery in London,” as Reuters says (more details here). Rumors I’ve heard say the price may reach $100 million.
The Lock fetched £10.9 million at Sotheby’s in 1990, when it was purchased by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. Not a bad return even at the low end.
Rosenthal, however, called the sale “morally shameful,” and told the Baroness in his resignation letter that she “had no understanding of either art history or art appreciation,” according to London’s Daily Mail.
In response, she told the Mail: “I cannot afford to keep the painting. People think I am wealthy because I was married to Baron Thyssen. But I have never had a lot of cash because my business is in paintings but the paintings don’t give me any money, they just hang on the walls of the museum for free.” Besides, she said, British paintings do not figure highly in her collection. Most of Thyssen’s collection was sold to the Spanish state, but about 250 works remain in the Baroness’s private collection — including the Constable — and have been lent to Spain for the last 13 years, on view at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum.
“Tita’s” stepdaughter, Francesca Von Habsburg, has also disagreed publicly with the sale. Last week, the Mail said she said that her late father would never have sold it and accused her stepmother of “putting the museum’s international reputation at risk.”
Rosenthal and von Hapsburg say that she doesn’t need the money and/or she should sell other things.
What about those earrings?