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Eagerness to Buy Old Masters at Odds With Their Availability in Auctions

LONDON — Art buyers rarely yearned for Old Masters as intensely as they appeared to do this week. Sadly, auction houses never had so few desirable pictures to offer them.

Christie’s

A portrait of Mrs. William Villebois by Thomas Gainsborough.

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Christie’s

"Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Jockey and a Stable Lad," by George Stubbs.

The bidders’ eagerness was reflected in surprising world records set for works that would hardly have caused such a sensation only a decade ago.

At Christie’s Tuesday sale, the two highest prices were realized by 18th century English school pictures that appealed to a limited constituency until fairly recently.

True, the huge £22.44 million, or $35.79 million, paid for “Gimcrack on New Market Heath,” painted by Stubbs and portraying a famous racehorse that had belonged to Lord Bolingbroke, was an artificial price achieved through a now all too common procedure publicly spelled out.

Before opening the session, Christie’s auctioneer, James Bruce-Gardyne, informed the room that “a third party” was financing a guarantee given to the vendor. This did not just ensure the consignor that he would be paid a minimum amount whether the picture sold or failed to do so. It also meant that the financial burden of failure risk was transferred from Christie’s to the “third party,” who would become the owner of the Stubbs at the “guaranteed” level if it remained unwanted. The said party was contractually entitled to participate in the bidding in order to raise prices to whatever level it wished, thus skewing the spontaneous character that auction bidding is supposed to have.

The financed guarantee procedure is in itself a sign of the desperate efforts that auction houses make to secure top-level works of art for sale as supplies keep vanishing. It tends to be used when pictures are billed with some exaggeration as masterpieces of stellar importance.

While Christie’s team sang the Stubbs to high heaven, blatant weaknesses might have limited its appeal. The trainer who clutches the horse’s bridle and the stable lad are as stiff as Madame Tussaud’s waxen figures and the outhouse in the distance is painted with curiously amateurish clumsiness.

As far as I could tell, only one bid came in, allowing the Stubbs to sell at the low estimate. Had the history of the horse not been recorded in minute detail, the bland picture could never have fetched its phenomenal price.

Other than that, Stubbs did not excite buyers that day, judging from the performance of two other pictures by the animalier artist. One, signed and dated 1799, depicts a dark bay horse in a hazy landscape. It sold 20 percent under the low estimate for only £97,250. The other, which portrays a spaniel, suffers some condition problems that do not actually impair its appearance. Quite good, also signed and dated — one digit is unclear — it dropped unwanted far below the low estimate.

By contrast, no artifice was necessary to send a very grand Gainsborough soaring to a record £6.53 million. The likeness of Mrs. William Villebois was commissioned around 1777 by her grandfather Benjamin Truman. This is the archetypal aristocratic portrait of 18th-century England. Although conventionally composed, it ranks among Gainsborough’s masterpieces. Impeccable condition combined with the renewed interest in English art with a known historical context made it irresistible.

The same attraction to history accounts for the interest taken in Jacobean portraits that were never sought with comparable enthusiasm in the past. Marcus Gheeraerts II, a Flemish artist from Bruges who set up shop in London where he became the most fashionable establishment portraitist, painted a life-size likeness in 1611 of Frances Howard, Countess of Hertford. Wearing a masquerade dress, the young woman smiles with a soupçon of shyness. Consigned from the same collection as the Gainsborough, the Gheeraerts was appreciated for the great rarity it is nowadays and shot up to £1.72 million.

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