'No reserves' at Christie's
June 7 2022
Picture: Christie's
Christie's in New York has an interesting sale, of Old Masters online with 'no reserves'. Unreserved pictures - where the vendor is happy to get rid of the lot whatever it fetches - aren't unknown at auction, but there's rarely more than one or two in each sale (and even then, they're not trumpeted; I remember sitting in a Christie's sale in London about ten years ago when a really beautiful and large Philippe de Champaigne came up, estimated in the tens of thousands, and the bidding started at £500. I didn't have my wits about me fast enough to bid, and it only made a few thousand. I still regret it). In this sale there are 105 lots, all from different vendors, and I wonder how Christie's managed to persuade so many people to take the risk. Perhaps there was no choice.
But it's worth keeping an eye on the sale, if you're after a bargain. As things stand, you could assemble an entire collection of decent Old Master names for less than $5k. There's a perfectly nice Jan Wijnants landscape (above) estimated at $30k-$50k, currently selling at $1,700; a Daniel Mytens portrait of Sir Henry Hobart (est $20k-$30k) for $300; and an interesting small head study on panel, of the kind done in Rembrandt's studio by his pupils, attributed to Govaert Flinck currently at $400 (est $15k-$20k).
The picture I was most drawn to, an oil study catalogued as 'Circle of George Romney' has alas already gone some way over its estimate of $3k-$5k and is currently at $15k. I suspect this reflects the fact that it looks plausibly Romney-like, and though it's included in Alex Kidson's excellent new Romney catalogue raisonné as 'does not appear autograph' it seems he was writing when the picture was untraced (no.1736mm), and he had to judge it from an old black and white illustration in Herbert Maxwell's biography of Romney (where it is illustrated, p.105, as by Romney). If it is by Romney, it would be a repetition of a first version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which he sometimes did.
Good luck if you're bidding. It will be interesting to see how the sale does. In recent years, the bigger auction houses have stopped doing these lower value sales for Old Masters, since they were deemed not to be worth the cost of gathering, cataloguing, displaying and auctioning the pictures. But if the whole thing can now be done online, with no risk of lots failing to sell, then the economics presumably become more attractive. Personally, I think it's important for Sotheby's and Christie's to keep offering lower value paintings, as a way to develop the market for collectors, and so keep newer generations on a pathway to bid for the more valuable stuff. For this format to work best, however, they'll need to improve their digital offering, with better images, a slicker website (which works on tablets and phones), and something more than just basic catalogue text.
Update - in the end most things sold quite well, with only a handful of the 105 lots not making their initial lower estimate. The Wijnants made $44k, the Romney $37k. The sale total was $1.3m, which must represent quite a good return for Christie's, in terms of commission, without so many of the traditional costs of putting on such a sale.
