No Bids for Holbein

Last week's Old Masters sales in London illustrated both the highs and lows of this sector of the market. The painting that had monopolised Sotheby's pre-sale publicity was Hans Holbein the Younger's Portrait of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, bought as an English School picture by the London dealer Christopher Gibbs for £2,800 in 1974. After three decades of research led by Sir Roy Strong, the former director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, this mid-16th-century portrait of a Tudor rake executed for leading a rebellion against Queen Mary was attributed to Holbein. Sotheby's estimated the painting at £2 million to £3 million but last Wednesday not a single hand was raised to bid for it. The picture's poor condition did not help its prospects, and a newspaper story suggesting that the curator of a Holbein exhibition at Tate Britain had not asked to borrow it because there were doubts that it was by the artist delivered the coup de grâce. The Holbein was one of 24 pictures, more than a third of the total, that failed to find a buyer at Sotheby's, yet the sale was far from being a disaster. Of the 43 pictures that did go to new homes, two-thirds sold above their high estimate and nine new artists' records were established. For the full story - click the title Irish Art