£530m Forthcoming Art Sales

The Telegraph reports that a collection of art with an estimated value of £530 million will start to go under the hammer at Sotheby's and Christie's next week in the biggest February sales London has seen. The Impressionist, modern and contemporary art auctions, spread over the month, will test whether the art market will buck the gloom in the financial markets. Sellers, buoyed by soaring art prices in the past five years, have put pictures out in force but there is an anxious wait to see if the buyers will be in London. At Christie's, the top price work is a 1970s Francis Bacon triptych, prompted by the suicide of his lover, George Dyer, with an estimate of £25 million, the highest for any work of art offered at auction in Europe. It may set a world auction record for a British artist. (For full source and full article click the Headline). Irish Art