NEW YORK, NY.- There are collections that accumulate, and collections that crystallize. Magnum Opus: A Private Collection of Exceptional Art and Objects Through the Ages belongs unmistakably to the second category. Assembled over decades by a single, deeply committed collector, the collection encompasses more than 900 works spanning millennia and continents — from Roman imperial marble, Old Master paintings, ancient Near Eastern ceramics, Islamic court carpets, and royal French furniture to Impressionist masterworks and exceptional 20th century design. Yet what distinguishes it is not its sheer breadth, remarkable as it is, but the singular intelligence that binds it. Across every medium and every era, a set of abiding preoccupations with the human form, with the dialogue between material and meaning, and with the enduring power of provenance holds the collection together as a coherent and deeply personal vision.
The collector's residences have served as the living theater for these objects. A cuirassed marble torso of a Roman emperor commands a room that also holds Richard Avedon's revered portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Four Savonnerie carpets commissioned by Louis XIV for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre lie beneath furniture that once belonged to Marie-Antoinette. Canaletto's view of Venice hangs above a room where Rodin and Picasso sculptures occupy the same intimate spaces as Jean-Michel Frank lamps and Kaare Klint chairs. The effect is not eclecticism but synthesis: a mosaic of civilizations assembled with the patience and authority of a collector who understood that the greatest works of art speak across time, and that the truest connoisseurship lies in hearing what they say to one another.
In more than fifty years in this field, I have encountered very few collections that achieve what this one does — a true coherence of vision across such extraordinary breadth. Every category, every object, every painting reflects the same discerning eye and the same deeply held conviction that the finest works of art, whatever their origin or era, belong in conversation with one another. To bring this collection to market is a rare privilege, and one that I believe will resonate far beyond the auction. -- GEORGE WACHTER, CHAIRMAN, SOTHEBY’S
This October, Sotheby's will present this collection across an immersive public exhibition at the Breuer, opening October 17 and running through October 22, with works displayed across four floors of the building. Highlights from the collection will then be offered across an historic series of four single-owner sales in New York, together comprising more than 600 works and estimated to realize in excess of $60 million. Unfolding over four consecutive days, the series opens with the Magnum Opus Evening Auction, showcasing the collection's most exceptional masterworks across categories, before continuing through three thematic day sales: Act II: Figure & Form, Act III: Darkness & Light, and Act IV: Ornament & Texture. Preview exhibitions open this week in New York and London on June 27. The single-owner series marks only the beginning: works and objects from the collection will continue to appear across 22 additional sales at Sotheby's New York and Paris, spanning categories from Contemporary and Modern Art to Books and Manuscripts, Jewelry, Prints and Photographs, and Design, with the full offering unfolding well into 2027.
A collection of this scope, more than 900 works spanning antiquity to the 20th century and offered across 26 sales on two continents over the course of more than a year, is something we encounter perhaps once in a generation. What makes it truly remarkable is that it never feels like an accumulation. Every work, in every category, bears the mark of a collector who approached each acquisition with the same exacting standards and the same fundamental belief that objects of quality speak across time. Bringing this collection to Sotheby’s, and to the world, is an extraordinary honor. -- CATHERINE FOSTER ELLISON, GLOBAL HEAD OF MAJOR COLLECTIONS, SOTHEBY’S
THE FOUR ACTS
The Magnum Opus sale series has been conceived as four distinct but interconnected chapters, each organized around a unifying theme rather than a traditional category framework, reflecting the deeply cross-disciplinary nature of the collection itself.
ACT I: The Magnum Opus Evening Auction launches the series with a selection of the collection's exceptional masterworks, bringing together fine art, ancient sculpture, Islamic works of art and courtly carpets, furniture, decorative arts and 20th century design in a single auction that mirrors the collector's instinct for dialogue across disciplines. Among the Evening Auction’s most arresting pairings: a cuirassed marble torso of a Roman emperor, the only such example in private hands with an extensive documented provenance extending back more than two centuries, will share the saleroom with a small, early print of Richard Avedon's celebrated portrait of Marilyn Monroe from 1957, one of the defining images of 20th century photography. Two icons of presence and power, separated by two millennia, united in a single room.
ACT II: Figure & Form examines the enduring power of the human presence and its abstraction. The sale brings together marble and bronze sculpture, painted and photographic portraits, and decorative works distinguished by their sculptural clarity, tracing the ways in which artists across time and medium have returned, ceaselessly, to the body as their primary subject.
ACT III: Darkness & Light explores the expressive power of contrast, uniting works in black and white alongside paintings that harness light itself as a compositional force. Shadow, illumination and tonal restraint heighten drama, depth and emotional resonance across a cross-category grouping that encompasses works on paper, sculpture, furniture, 20th century design, Islamic tiles, and more.
ACT IV: Ornament & Texture closes the series by celebrating the sensory richness of material and surface. Wool carpets, ceramics, furniture in wood and glass, silver and hardstone objects come together in a meditation on pattern, craftsmanship and tactile depth. Islamic works of art, including impressive carpets and ceramics of remarkable provenance, feature prominently alongside decorative objects spanning centuries and continents, united not by period or origin but by the expressive power of their making.
A GLIMPSE INSIDE THE COLLECTION
Ancient Sculpture and Works of Art
At the heart of the collection's engagement with antiquity is a conviction that ancient objects are not relics but living presences, fragments of a shared cultural inheritance that retain their power to command, to move and to speak. The collector approached ancient art in the tradition of the great Renaissance studioli, treating each work as both an aesthetic object and a vessel of accumulated human meaning, a philosophy borne out by an unwavering commitment to scholarship, condition and provenance that distinguishes every work in this section of the collection.
The most commanding of these is a marble torso of a Roman emperor, Julio-Claudian period, from the first half of the 1st century A.D. (estimate: $8-12 million). Marked by a convergence of powerful iconography, pristinely preserved condition and provenance history, this torso stands as the most important Roman Imperial sculpture to come to auction in over a decade, and is the only known example outside of an institutional collection. Its provenance is well documented and includes an extensive publication history beginning in 1926. Probably representing Augustus, Tiberius or Claudius, this torso represents a visual embodiment of the beginning of the Roman empire’s language of political power and martial authority. It draws a clear comparison to one of the most widely recognized sculptures from the Imperial period: the Augustus Prima Porta, now a hallmark of the Vatican Museums collections. The carving achieves a vitality that seems to defy the inherent weight of stone, with finely articulated fringed lappets capturing movement in marble. The relief decoration across the cuirass remains crisp and commanding: the god Sol emerges in his chariot above winged Victories flanking a trophy, imagery that speaks to the absolute authority of imperial rule.
Its counterpart in spirit is an Augustan marble portrait head of a girl, 27 B.C. to A.D. 14 (estimate: $2.5-3.5 million). Where the imperial torso commands through sheer physical force, this exquisite head achieves something quieter yet no less powerful: a portrait of dignity, restraint and idealized beauty. The softly modeled face, wide contemplative eyes and precisely articulated coiffure are images after Livia, Emperor Augustus’ formidable wife and the defining model of Roman female virtue and dynastic power. It has been a part of the prestigious von Schwarzenberg Collection and, prior to that, the collection of Sir D'Arcy Osborne, the 12th Duke of Leeds. It is among the finest female portrait heads to appear on the antiquities market in decades.
Old Master Painting
The Old Master paintings in the collection range across genre, region and century, yet they are bound by a quality that transcends period and subject: an almost uncanny command of light. From the flickering shadows that move across the face of Fragonard's elderly subject to the warm diagonal gleam that sparks off the water and sculpts the architecture in Canaletto's view of Venice. In this, the Old Masters in the collection speak directly to the Impressionist and Modern works that surround them in the collector's home, revealing a sensibility drawn not to any single school or tradition but to the enduring formal qualities that make a painting live.
The anchor of the selection is Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto's Venice, a View of the Grand Canal Looking East with Santa Maria della Salute (estimate: $6-8 million). Painted circa 1740 during the height of Canaletto's Venetian period, the work offers a majestic bird's eye view of the landing stage before the Salute, the great votive church consecrated by the Venetian Senate in thanksgiving for the city's deliverance from the plague of 1630. The warm sunlight and clear shadows evoke a peaceful afternoon on the Grand Canal, populated with gondolas, merchant ships and figures moving in and out of Longhena's magnificent church. The painting was previously in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and stands among the most accomplished treatments of this celebrated subject in Canaletto's work.
Luis Meléndez's Oranges, Nuts, Spices, Boxes of Sweetmeats, a Jug and a Cask on a Table (estimate: $4-6 million) represents the height of achievement by one of the great still life painters of the European tradition. Meléndez's path to this mastery was shaped by circumstance: early ambitions as a history painter were derailed by his expulsion from the Academy, leading to independent study in Naples and an exposure to the tenebrist tradition that would come to define his work. The result is a painting of extraordinary technical precision, its everyday objects transformed through meticulous observation into a composition of remarkable luminosity and depth. This work held the world auction record for the artist from its 2012 sale until just last year at Sotheby’s where Meléndez's Still Life with a Cauliflower, A Basket with Eggs, Leeks, and Fish, and Assorted Kitchen Utensils achieved $6.2 million.
Jacob van Ruisdael's panoramic view of Haarlem, View of Haarlem from the Northwest (estimate: $2.5-3.5 million), captures the city on a breezy summer afternoon seen from the dunes to the northwest across the expansive bleaching fields. One of the celebrated series of painted panoramas the artist produced throughout the 1660s and early 1670s, the work is distinguished by its dynamic interplay of warm and cool tones, towering cumulus clouds casting shifting patterns of light and shadow across the city and its surroundings.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Head of an Old Man (estimate: $1-1.5 million), belongs to a select group of character heads the artist produced from the mid-1760s to early 1770s, works that reveal his deep engagement with Rembrandt's dramatic use of light and shadow while showcasing a freedom and energy of brushwork that anticipates the Impressionists by nearly a century.
Francesco Guardi's View of the south bank of the Grand Canal, with Ca' Pesaro (estimate: $1,000,000 - 1,500,000), is unquestionably the finest and most important drawing by the artist to remain in private hands. Drawn with an almost painterly quality and executed on an unusually large scale, this exquisitely preserved sheet depicts the splendor of Venice through its portrayal of the Grand Canal and the imposing presence of Ca' Pesaro, one of the city's most important Baroque palaces. The strong Venetian theme found within the Old Master Drawings from the collection continues with three quintessential examples by the great Venetian master, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, including two exceptional sheets from his celebrated series illustrating scenes from the life of Punchinello, representing The Nursing of Punchinello (estimate: $200,000 - 300,000) and Punchinello is Viewed by Mourners (estimate: $400,000 - 600,000).
Impressionist and Modern Art
Across painting, works on paper and sculpture, the Impressionist and Modern works in the collection trace the shifting ways in which artists from the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries observed, interpreted and reimagined the human form. From an exquisite, large-scale Degas pastel to Picasso's Rose period bronze, and including works executed at the height of Fauvism by André Derain, these works share a preoccupation with the body as both formal subject and emotional vessel, a thread that connects them as naturally to the collection's ancient sculptures as to its 20th century design.
Edgar Degas's pastel Danseuse rajustant son chausson (estimate: $5–7 million) stands among the most accomplished works from the celebrated series of ballet studies the artist produced from the early 1870s onward. By the mid-1880s, Degas had turned his attention from sweeping, multi-figural compositions to the more intimate observation of individual dancers, caught in the unguarded, workaday moments between performances: adjusting a slipper, straightening a strap, fluffing a skirt. Here, a ballerina reaches toward her ankle to fix a loose ribbon, her contorted pose a testament to Degas's extraordinary ability to render ephemeral movement in pastel.
Max Ernst's Jeune homme au coeur battant (ou Sauteur de mur ou Oiseau vole) (estimate: $1–1.5 million) was conceived in 1944 during Ernst's sojourn on Long Island with Dorothea Tanning, cast from plaster poured into molds fashioned from whatever materials were at hand in a converted garage workshop: a cylindrical bucket, a metal box, the pans of a scale, a spoon. The result is a figure of remarkable clarity and presence, its simplified geometric forms balanced in a way that is entirely unique to Ernst, hovering between abstraction and figuration with the ease and playfulness that defined his approach to sculpture. In its almost totemic quality, the work reflects Ernst's engagement with the Surrealist concept of play as a serious artistic method, and stands as one of the most compelling bronzes of his career.
Pablo Picasso's Le Fou (estimate: $1–2 million), conceived in 1905 on the cusp of the artist's transition from the Blue to the Rose period, was inspired by his close friend, the writer Max Jacob. The work was born on the evening the two returned from the circus together, Picasso modeling the form in wax before the night was out. The circus and its performers would become central to the Rose period, as Picasso turned his attention to the acrobats, jesters and saltimbanques who lived on the margins of Parisian society. The jester's cap that crowns the figure is no mere accessory but an extension of the costume that appears across some of the most celebrated canvases of the period, among them Le Lapin Agile in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its pointed silhouette becoming one of the most recognizable emblems of Picasso’s Rose period iconography.
The Degas, Ernst, and Picasso will each be offered in Sotheby's New York marquee sales this November.
What strikes me immediately about this modern collection is the unity of vision behind it. From Degas’ extraordinary command of color and form to Picasso’s mastery of sculptural medium and narrative — from early in a career that was never less than singular — each work finds an artist at a moment of genuine consequence. Together they don’t simply document great individual acquisitions. They reveal a collector who understood these artists deeply, and chose accordingly. -- SCOTT NIICHEL, VICE CHAIRMAN, IMPRESSIONIST AND MODERN ART, SOTHEBY’S
Photographs
Richard Avedon's Marilyn Monroe, Actress, New York City, May 6, 1957 (estimate: $100,000-150,000), is among the defining portraits of both photographer and subject. Made at the close of an extended sitting during which Monroe performed her public persona with characteristic brilliance, the image captures the moment her guard drops: eyes lowered, shoulders slightly slumped, the famous face suddenly distant and stripped of its usual radiance.
It is a picture that punctures myth in favor of truth, and it is entirely at home in a collection defined by its unflinching engagement with the human presence in all its complexity. The print offered here was made shortly after the negative and before 1960. It is unique in its size and historically significant as an early print.
Islamic Works of Art and Important Carpets
The Islamic works of art and carpets in the collection represent one of its most quietly authoritative dimensions, assembled with a connoisseur's eye for quality, condition and the weight of accumulated provenance. Magnificent classical carpets and a rich group of ceramics and tiles form the basis of these holdings, the two categories speaking to one another across the collection with a naturalness that reflects the collector's instinct for dialogue over taxonomy. The names of great collectors of the 19th and early 20th centuries run through the provenances like a watermark: Clark, Yerkes, Deering, von Hirsch, Leighton, Jacoby — figures whose custodianship of these objects in an earlier era lends each work an additional layer of historical resonance.
The Bernheimer Safavid 'Vase' carpet fragment, Kirman, Southeast Persia, early 17th century (estimate: $350,000-500,000), is among the most celebrated works in the group, its beauty and rarity well documented since it was first exhibited in 1926. Woven with exuberant split-arabesques above a plane of flowering shrubs, the fragment retains jewel-like colors that enhance the wonderfully fluid drawing that epitomizes Safavid Kirman weaving. Mounted as an artwork, it is a painting in dyed wool. It is joined by an Isfahan carpet from mid-17th century Central Persia (estimate: $400,000-600,000), and the 'Yerkes-Remarque' Mughal hunting carpet from the first half of the 17th century (estimate: $250,000-350,000), as well as a fragment from the von Hirsch garden carpet, Northwest Persia, 17th century (estimate: $200,000-300,000), each carrying with it the distinguished provenance that runs as a defining thread through the collection's rug holdings.
Among the ceramics and tiles, an Iznik cintamani pottery tile produced in Ottoman Turkey, circa 1580 (estimate: $120,000-180,000), serves as a perfect bridge between the collection's carpet and ceramic holdings. The cintamani motif, arguably the most distinct and striking device in Iznik pottery, is rendered here in only three colors outlined in black, each iteration sitting freely upon the white ground with a slight tilt implying movement. The tile was formerly owned by Heinrich Jacoby (1889-1964), the prominent collector and founder of the carpet firm PETAG, whose own use of the cintamani motif as his firm's logo speaks to the enduring power of this ancient design. It is a small object of considerable presence, and a fitting emblem of the collection's broader ambition: to honor the objects of the past with the seriousness they deserve.
Rugs and carpets are key components of the finest private and institutional collections of Islamic Art. The Magnum Opus Collection is no exception as it includes three luminescent Isfahan carpets from the revered William A. Clark Collection, originally acquired in the landmark sale of the Corcoran Art Gallery at Sotheby’s New York in 2013. The Bernheimer and Von Hirsch fragments represent two of the great world carpets, and add to this the names of Charles Deering, Charles T. Yerkes and the more recent Sir Howard Hodgkin and you are presented with an enormously enticing array of celebrated collectors, whose discerning tastes are reflected in this exceptional offering. -- BENEDICT CARTER, SENIOR DIRECTOR | HEAD OF DEPARTMENT, ISLAMIC & INDIAN ART, SOTHEBY’S
Important Furniture and Decorative Arts
The collection's furniture and decorative arts span more than two centuries of European manufacture, from the grandeur of Louis XIV’s court to the final years of the French monarchy on the eve of the revolution. From classic antique case pieces and seat furniture to French gilt bronzes, Georgian silver, Sèvres, Meissen and Imperial Russian porcelain, gold boxes and porphyry vases, these objects reflect an international outlook and an insatiable curiosity grounded always in an unwavering eye for quality. What unifies them, beyond the extraordinary range of their materials and origins, is a sensitivity to historical association: to where objects have been, and who has owned them.
Nowhere is this more powerfully expressed than in a group of three Savonnerie fragmentary carpets from Louis XIV's legendary commission of more than one hundred carpets, designed by the official court painter Charles Le Brun to cover the entire length of the Apollo Gallery and the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, a total of 520 metres. Completed but never installed after Louis XIV transferred his court to the newly built Palace of Versailles, the set was partially dispersed, with the remaining carpets in the French national collections only exhibited together for the first time in the recent, celebrated exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris, with a smaller version of that exhibition opening at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this September. The three fragmentary carpets in this collection are among the rare surviving examples in private hands.
The theme of French royal provenance continues in a pair of Louis XVI giltwood Marquises attributed to Georges Jacob, circa 1785 (estimate: $200,000-300,000). Originally supplied to the Comte de Vaudreuil, a courtier and favorite of Marie-Antoinette, the pair was subsequently acquired by the French Royal Household and used by Marie-Antoinette herself in her private apartments at the Tuileries Palace from 1791 to 1792, her last royal residence before her imprisonment and execution during the French Revolution. Works of sculpture in their own right, the Marquises serve as an emotionally charged witness to the waning days of the monarchy. The collection's European sculpture is equally distinguished, among them a marble relief by Jean-Antoine Houdon, La Grive Morte (The Dead Thrush), dated 1782 (estimate: $400,000-600,000), in which the foremost French sculptor of the 18th century renders a lifeless bird suspended from a nail with a realism so precise it seems to defy the medium entirely.
A rare pair of Brussels Chinoiserie tapestries (estimate: $500,000-700,000), stands as an exceptional example of a distinctive European decorative and artistic style reflecting an imaginative interpretation of East Asian design. Produced by the workshop of Judocus de Vos at the turn of the 18th century, when Chinoiserie had become the height of fashion across Europe, Brussels weavings in this aesthetic are exceedingly rare, with few surviving examples and little documentation of their original commissions.
The collection's silver and ceramics highlights are equally distinguished in their breadth and historical association. The European silver ranges across early Continental and English examples, with a particular emphasis on rare early French silver, among them a small French silver caster by Pierre Valette III, Perpignan, circa 1690 to 1710, which descended through the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. The ceramics are anchored by two groups of exceptional royal provenance: Sèvres wine bottle coolers made for Marie-Antoinette in 1784 (estimate: $30,000-40,000), and two Sèvres plates from the Service de dessert marly Rouge, produced for Napoleon in 1808 and delivered to the Château of Fontainebleau.
What distinguishes this collection is the seriousness in which every object has been chosen. Whether it is a fragment of a carpet woven for Louis XIV or a pair of chairs that stood in Marie-Antoinette’s private apartments, each piece carries its history with it - and this collector understood that history as well as any connoisseur I have encountered in my years in this field. -- MARIO TAVELLA, CHAIRMAN EUROPE, PRESIDENT OF SOTHEBY’S FRANCE, CHAIRMAN OF MAJOR COLLECTIONS, EUROPE
The breadth of this collection within the decorative arts is extraordinary, from Savonnerie carpets made for a king to Sèvres porcelain delivered to an emperor’s castle. But what makes it truly remarkable is that at every level, from the grandest piece to the most intimate, the standard of quality never wavers. This is what separates a great collection from a large one. -- HELEN CULVER SMITH, INTERNATIONAL HEAD OF DECORATIVE ARTS, GLOBAL HEAD OF RUSSIAN WORKS OF ART, SOTHEBY’S
20th Century Design
The collection’s holdings in 20th-century design reflect a discerning and deeply personal engagement with the evolution of modernism across Europe, anchored by outstanding works from France, Scandinavia, Italy, and the United States.
Highlights include Kaare Klint and Edvard Kindt-Larsen’s Pair of “Mix” Easy Chairs, Model 4396, designed in 1930 and executed in 1935 (estimate: $40,000–60,000), a compelling demonstration of Klint’s disciplined approach, grounded in proportion, ergonomics, and a scholarly understanding of historical precedents that laid the foundation for Danish modernism.
A carved wood bed by Armand-Albert Rateau — whose work bridges Art Deco refinement and a timeless classicism — introduces a sculptural richness to the ensemble. A rare coffee table by Gio Ponti (estimate: $30,000–50,000), designed circa 1951 for the first-class ballroom of the ocean liner Giulio Cesare, speaks to Italy’s singular ability to unite modernist ideals with exceptional artisanal craftsmanship. A refined group of Italian glass by Ercole Barovier, Carlo Scarpa, and Fulvio Bianconi, led by a rare "Scozzese" Vase by Bianconi (estimate: $20,000-30,000), further underscores the vitality and innovation of Murano production.
Furniture and lighting by Jean-Michel Frank and Jacques Adnet exemplify the restraint and rigor of French modernism. Among these, Frank’s glass and bronze table lamp (estimate: $50,000–70,000) and pair of oak side tables (estimate: $40,000–60,000) highlight his nuanced use of materials and pared-back forms. Together, these works articulate a sophisticated dialogue between material, form, and craftsmanship.
Among the most architecturally ambitious works in the collection are a pair of elevator screens from the Chicago Stock Exchange by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler (estimate: $25,000–35,000). Transcending furniture entirely, they embody the spirit of the early skyscraper and the enduring principle that structure and ornament can coexist in dynamic harmony.
This collection represents everything we look for when we talk about truly great collecting: depth, coherence, and an unwavering standard of quality across every category. The design works alone, from the intellectual rigor of Kaare Klint to the architectural brilliance of Louis Sullivan, would be remarkable in their own right. But it is the way these objects live alongside Roman sculpture, Old Master painting and royal French furniture that reveals the full measure of this collector’s vision. That is what makes Magnum Opus a once-in-a-generation event. -- JODI POLLACK, CHAIRMAN, 20TH CENTURY DESIGN AND CHAIRMAN, MAJOR COLLECTIONS, SOTHEBY’S
