Turner hits £30m
December 4 2014
Picture: Art Daily
Congratulations to Sotheby's for achieving a record price for Turner last night; £30.3m for 'Rome, from Mount Aventine'.
Regular readers will know why I've used the above photo.
Sotheby's sale total last night was £53.9m. So even without the Turner they'd have comfortably beaten Christie's total of £13.9m, by some £10m. Other strong results included: a Canaletto of St Mark's square, at £5.48m; a Pieter Brueghel the Younger village scene at £2.6m; and a still life by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder at £1.02m. This last picture has a relatively new attribution, having been previously attributed to Ludger tom Ring II. A large and interesting English landscape of c.1665 failed to sell at £400,000-£600,000.
Update - in The New York Times, Scott Reyburn has a good piece on the Turner price and the rest of the week's sales.