This astonishing result was the main talking point of Sotheby’s March 29-30 dispersal of the collection belonging to the interior designer Alberto Pinto, whose understated taste for ormolu, solid gold, giltwood, and multicoloured Palissy and majolica wares clearly struck a chord with Sotheby’s affluent stateside client list.
The 683 lots of this two-day sale netted around $5.5m against a pre-sale high estimate of $4.6m and 95 per cent of the material found buyers.
This impressively large 3ft 6in by 4ft (1.02 x 1.22m) canvas of Felis pardalis smugly cradling a downed parrot was the work of Johann Friedrich Seupel, a little-documented German painter who worked in St. Petersburg during the late 18th century, becoming an agrée to the Academy in 1785.
This once-in-a-lifetime buy for ocelot lovers was signed and dated 1791 and had been estimated at $25,000-35,000. The buyer was described by Sotheby’s as a “European private”.
Exchange rate: £1 = $1.62
The cat’s whiskers
US: How do you titillate an ocelot? You oscillate its tit a lot. Kenny Everett’s immortal insight into the sexual life of one of the obscurer members of the cat family is usually quite difficult to drag into an auction report. But how can titillation be resisted when someone is prepared to pay $525,000 (£324,075) for this painting of an ocelot at Sotheby’s New York (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium).
