Hailing from a long line of art
collectors, Six grew up in the presence of several works of art by Rembrandt,
including a portrait of an ancestor painted in 1654. “I was obsessed with art from
an early age,” he says, and having researched Rembrandt for over 20 years, he
feels he’s now able to quickly recognise paintings related to the master.
The art dealer advised an investor to
bid on the work, but he wasn’t the only one who had an inkling about the actual
artist: estimated at €15,000-20,000 (S$23,200-31,000), the painting was
eventually sold to Six’s client for €1.5 million (S$2.32 million). The gamble
paid off as the work has since been recognized as being by Rembrandt and having
undergone four years of restoration it will go on view at the Museum de
Lakenhal in Leiden, Netherlands, in November.
Six struck gold a second time in 2016
when he noticed a 17th-century portrait in a Christie’s catalogue. The Portrait of a young man was attributed
to ‘Circle of Rembrandt van Rijn’ and had an estimate of £15,000-20,000
(S$26,500-35,500). Six recalls he had been extensively researching Rembrandt’s
early works and had noticed the artist had “this very idiosyncratic way of painting
a certain type of ruff (ruched lace white collar),” adding, “While most artists
were painting the lace as it was actually knitted; with endless different
strokes of white paint, Rembrandt did it differently, painting the ruff
entirely as a white form and then painting in the black spaces. It’s a
completely different approach; and of course when Rembrandt became big, people
started copying him, but in the early years that wasn’t the case.”
Being almost a hundred percent sure the
portrait was painted by Rembrandt himself, Six advised a client to bid for the
work, which was secured for £137,000 (S$242,100). It has since been
authenticated as a Rembrandt by Professor Ernst van de Wetering of the
Rembrandt Research Project, widely considered the world’s foremost authority on
the painter.
Though the two works are available for
sale, Six refused be drawn on their value, but his investors will no doubt
expect to make a healthy return. The record for a Rembrandt painting at auction
was set in 2009 with Portrait of a man,
half-length, with his arms akimbo going for £20.2 million (S$35.7 million)
while a sale brokered by Christie’s in 2015 saw the French banker Eric de
Rothschild sell a pair of Rembrandt portraits to the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre
for €160 million (S$247.5 million).
The exceptional result of the 2017 sale
of a rediscovered work by Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundi – bought for US$450.3 million (S$609.2 million) against
an estimate of US$100 million – shows how difficult it is to estimate the value
of a newly attributed Old Master.
Pricing newly discovered Old Masters is
extremely difficult and you need to take a number of considerations into
account, says Alexandra Toscano, director of the Carlo Orsi –Trinity Fine Art
gallery in London. “Obviously, there is what the artist has fetched at auction
in the past, but auction is not the only barometer; you (also) have to take
into account the rarity, the condition and the provenance, and how quickly it
will be possible to buy something else similar. Sometimes it’s a unique opportunity,
and that has a value.”
State
of the Old Masters’ market
According to Blouin Art Sales Index, the
Old Masters’ share of the auction market has been contracting for years, having
peaked at 22.4% of the overall market in 1991, it has declined steadily to just
8% in 2017, while contemporary art has soared.
Now a new generation of art dealers and
auctioneers is making Old Masters hip again. Christie’s and Sotheby’s have each
partnered with interior designers to demonstrate how Old Masters can be presented
in a chic contemporary setting, while Sotheby’s has also collaborated twice with
Victoria Beckham to promote its evening sales. Popular culture is also helping
develop a new generation of art lover for the Masters. Last year Beyoncé and
Jay-Z filmed a music video in The Louvre, prominently featuring key works
including the Mona Lisa, and their
video is now credited with helping the museum break ticket-sale records with
more than 10 million visitors in 2018, up 25% on the previous year.
According to art market research firm
ArtTactic, recent statistics indicate an optimistic trend in the category: based
on a survey of sixteen dealers in Old Masters, 63% reported that sales were up
over the first half of 2018 in comparison to last year, while an average of 41%
of sales made in their galleries in the last year have been to new clients,
which for more than half of those galleries is a higher percentage than the
previous year.
“Good works always find a buyer, but the
market has slumped at the lower to middle range end. Yet Old Masters are
exceedingly good value price wise compared with some prices obtained by
contemporary artists and more recently we’re been able to attract younger
buyers, though it’s quite difficult,” notes Toscano, adding she has also
started to notice more interest in Old Masters from Asian buyers.
New
found treasures
George Gordon, Co-Chairman Sotheby's
Worldwide Old Master Paintings, points out that previously unknown works or
long-lost pieces do come to the market more often than one might think. This is
particularly the case with Old Masters like Rembrandt who are especially “complex”
in their work because, Gordon explains, where art historians had previously
discounted some works as being from his students or just ‘of the period’,
progress in technologies to forensically examine paintings and new scholarly
studies now give a better understanding of the artist’s process and are
allowing for the attribution to be changed.
Infrared imaging, for example, has
become more accurate with higher resolutions, and in one case helped uncover
two fingerprints, believed to be those of Rembrandt, on a little-known oil
sketch, Study for a Head of a Young Man.
Indicative of the growing interest in Old Masters in Asia, the sketch was then
unveiled in Shanghai ahead of its sale in London in November for £9.5 million,
well over its estimate of £6 million. Sotheby’s also held an extensive selling
exhibition of Old Master paintings and drawings in Hong Kong last September.
This month , art lovers visiting
Carlo Orsi – Trinity Fine Art’s TEFAF Maastricht booth, will be able to
discover a 1547 painting recently reattributed to Antwerp artist Frans Floris
de Vriendt. Meanwhile later this year, two “previously unknown” works are also coming
to the market: one by Leonardo da Vinci and the other attributed to Caravaggio.
Parisian auction house Tajan will offer the
rediscovered work by Leonardo da Vinci, which has a wide-ranging estimate of
30-60 million euros, at a sale on June 19. The main drawing, The Martyred Saint Sebastian, with two
smaller scientific drawings on the back, is believed to be one of eight
mentioned by the artist in his Codex Atlanticus. And Marc Labarbe Auction in
Toulouse is planning to offer a work attributed to Caravaggio — though not all
experts agree — that was discovered in an attic in southern France in 2014.
A version of this article first appear in Robb Report Singapore March edition
A version of this article first appear in Robb Report Singapore March edition