Views do well while other works tick over

Sotheby’s featured 155 lots on December 9 in a sale totalling €1.4m (£897,500) with a little over three quarters selling. This session provided the most significant 19th
century painting to be sold
last month, Zandomeneghi’s Place Blanche, le matin, which sold for €560,000 (£359,000). This was followed some way behind by Giovanni Fattori’s Horsemen on patrol, dating from around 1875 and measuring 8 x 14in (24 x 37 cm), which made €160,000 (£102,560).

Views of specific places also proved popular, as demonstrated by the €95,000 (£90,900) paid for a view of the Port of Beirut in 1860 by Alberto Pasini, and a View of Bellagio by Eugenio Spreafico, which also sold above estimate at €36,000 (£23,080).

Christie’s featured 307 lots in Rome on November 26, selling 175 of them (57 per cent) for a total of about €1.7m (£1.1m): 75 per cent by value. Two artists’ records were claimed, neither being particularly well known outside Italy. The first of these was Michele Cammarano, whose Encouraging vice (said vice begging at the gates of a convent), sold for €140,000 (£89,750). The large oil on canvas, measuring 8ft 8in x 6ft 6in (2.67 x 1.99m), showed a mass of dark-clad figures before a gate in a wall, the whole in sharply contrasting sunlight from the left.

The second record was for Vincenzo Caprile, a Neapolitan, showing the Easter market in Naples’ Piazza del Mercato (the Easter element rather gruesomely being a mass of dead lambs hanging upside down from a cart). Another large work, this canvas provides an excellent portrayal of Neapolitan life of the time and sold for €105,000 (£67,310).

A group of people dancing the tarantella on the shores of the Gulf of Naples, with Vesuvius in the background by Raffaele Carelli dated 1830, fetched €130,000 (£83,330).

Another bucolic note was supplied by Filippo Palizzi, whose Return from the fields of 1871, showing a girl with a donkey carrying a load of hay and a flock of sheep in the evening light, made €112,000 (£71,800).

Finarte-Semenzato’s auction was held in Milan on December 18: 387 paintings, of which 205 sold. By far the highest price on the day was the €98,000 (£63,230) paid for Boldini’s portrait of a lady in a drawing room, seen with a Chinese vase and red carpet and walls.