The painting, described by the Newcastle auction house as “relined but fair for a picture of its age”, came with an old Royal Academy 1893 exhibition label stating the owner as the Earl Brownlow of Ashridge in Hertfordshire.
Three phone bidders vied for the 16½ x 18½in (42 x 47cm) oil on canvas and it was knocked down to one, a private buyer, for £19,000 on December 4. The sum was over six times the top guide.
Though undated, it is likely to be a late work by Ruisdael. He added seascapes and city panoramas, often painting two-thirds of the canvas with sky, to his regular repertoire when he moved to Amsterdam in the late 1650s. At auction, the artist’s famous panoramic Haarlempje (little views of Haarlem) painted in the 1660s and early 1670s and regarded as his finest achievements in the genre set the benchmark. One such painting previously owned by Adolf Hitler sold for a record £2.7m (with fees) at Sotheby’s last December.
Boudin coastal scene
Coming from the same family collection at the Newcastle sale was a signed coastal scene by one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors, Eugène Louis Boudin (1824-98), that sold for over double top estimate at £7800.
A Thomas Miles Richardson (1813-90) watercolour of Warkworth Castle in Northumberland, dated 1882, made £5700 against a £2000-3000 guide.
In January, Anderson & Garland will offer six more paintings from this collection by the artist-plantsman Cedric Morris (1889-1982), including a flower still-life estimated at £50,000-70,000.
