New York’s Old Master dealers used to have a week every winter, coinciding with the auction sales, that was filled with Sunday openings, evening hours, receptions and dinners. They’d put out their best art, and collectors would make several nights of it. Camaraderie was rampant. I don’t know exactly what happened to it, but it shrank long
before the recession set in, although some drawings dealers have been keeping the idea alive.
This year, London dealers tried something similar, to coincide with the July Old Master auctions there — and they’ve now voted it a success. From July 4-10, 23 dealers around Bond St. and in St. James’s, along with Sotheby’s and Christie’s, created an “event” called Master Paintings Week with art exhibitions and Sunday evening invitation-only openings to stimulate the market.
Galleries reported as many as 100 visitors a day — collectors, curators and conservators from several countries, including the U.S. (among the museums represented were the Metropolitan, Philadelphia, Denver, the National Gallery, the Kimbell, the Getty, MFA-Houston). And dealers report a “significant number of sales” as well as the laying of groundwork for future sales.
Of course, no one wants to give specifics and prices, so I will offer only a few examples. The Triumphal Entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinant into Antwerp, by Pieter Snayers (above, right), was one of three works sold by Michael Tollemache Fine Art — it went for about 40,000 Euros to a Belgian collector.
Ever-ebullient dealer Johnny van Haeften called the week “a brilliant success” and reports that he sold a large church interior by Anthonie De Lorme for six-figures in pounds sterling, an interior of a man reading by Willem van Mieris, and A Peasant Brawl by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, also for six figures in pounds sterling. Richard Green says he sold a Salomon Ruysdael landscape for “a six-figure sum” to a new client, and Fergus Hall Master Paintings sold Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Cornelius van Poelenburg (above, let) before the event — from the Master Paintings Week catalogue. It had an asking price of £30,000.
The dealers will hold a Master Pictures Week again next year, from July 3-9, 2010.
The auction houses, with much reduced offerings versus last year and by combining Old Master pictures with 19th Century works, also pulled off some good numbers: £69 million all told, which as The Telegraph reported (here) is “only £1 million less than the contemporary art sales the week before” — which is certainly a big switch. Sotheby’s sold Brueghel’s Massacre of the Holy Innocents for £4.6 million, his second-highest price at auction and more than 30 percent above its high estimate.
The numbers suggest, however, the same pattern common elsewhere in the art market — sales are occurring at the lower levels and at the highest levels. The middle-market is very slow.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of Michael Tollemache Fine Art (top); of Fergus Hall Master Paintings (bottom).