Thursday

£500 Titian Worth Millions?

The Telegraph reports that an art auction house was left in stunned silence when a painting estimated to sell for around £500 finally went for £205,000 and now some believe the work could actually be a long-lost Titian worth up to £5 million. The painting was humbly described as an "18th-century continental school, half-length portrait of an aesthete" and depicts a bearded man with a distant expression in his eyes. Experts now believe it is likely to have been painted between 1510 and 1520 and could well be the work of the great Venetian master Tiziano Vecelli, better known as Titian. It went under the hammer along with a handful of other works at Gilding's, a small, family-run auction house in Market Harborough, Leics. When bidding began on the painting which was put up as lot 403, the atmosphere in the room changed as the phone began ringing off the hook, said Mark Gilding, the auctioneer. "The atmosphere in the room became very tense. The bidding just went on and on," Mr Gilding told The Guardian. "Our opinion was that it was 18th century, after an early Italian artist. Obviously a couple of people thought differently: two people on the day turned up and battled it out. After minutes of tense bidding, the picture was finally sold at £205,000 - more than 400 times its estimate. All that is known so far is that the buyer was someone "in the London trade" and that the vendor was a private individual, a woman living locally, who bought the painting at a contents sale in 1974 from a house in the village of Great Glen, in Leicestershire The painting is very similar in style to Titian's Portrait of a Young Man, worth £55 million, which was previously hung in the National Gallery on loan from the Earl of Halifax. (For full source and article click the Headline). Irish Art