Old Masters

Researching Old Master paintings is sometimes likened to putting together the pieces of a jigsaw. But for one upcoming work, it seems this was quite literally the case.

A drawing offered at a Paris auction with an attribution to Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Francesco Penni (1488-1528) was hammered down at €1.13m (£980,000).

St James’s art dealer Derek Johns is offering a portrait of Sir Everard Fawkener, a former British ambassador to Constantinople, by Swiss artist Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-89).

The ‘Toulouse Caravaggio’ is currently on show at Paris Contemporary art dealership Galerie Kamel Mennour opposite a work more than 400 years its junior.

A Mannerist bronze after Giambologna and a rediscovered oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens posted seven-figure sums during the series of sales coinciding with the Salon du Dessin fair in Paris.

A pair of early George III carved walnut Gainsborough chairs, c.1765, were among the early highlight sales at BADA 2019. Offered from the stand of Richard Courtney in excellent original condition, they sold for a price in the region of £70,000.

Some areas of the secondary pictures market march to their own beat, appearing to defy the usual forces that determine value. Ancestral paintings are such a category.

Two previously unpublished ink sketches by John Constable (1776 -1837) excelled at Chiswick Auctions’ latest British & European Fine Art sale.

Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia has acquired a Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) portrait of an Irish veteran of the French and Indian War. The foundation bought it at Sotheby’s Old Master day sale in London in December when it sold for £40,000 plus premium.

Old Master art dealer Mark Weiss began exhibiting at TEFAF Maastricht in 1988. But for all the important 16th and 17th century portraits Weiss has sold at the Dutch fair since then, few are likely to have made a local connection quite like his gallery’s star object for 2019.