LONDON.- Led by a rare early history painting by the young Rembrandt, Sotheby's today draws back the curtain on its Old Master and 19th Century Paintings and Sculpture Evening Auction in London, on public view from tomorrow ahead of the sales on 1 July. One of the finest offerings of Old Master Paintings seen at Sotheby's London in the last decade, the sale is particularly rich in long-unseen, fresh-to-market works: sixteen works of the 46 works to be offered will be appearing now at auction for the very first time; nearly a third never been exhibited publicly before; and six have not been seen in public for over six decades.
Rembrandt's Let The Little Children Come Unto Me estimate £8–12 million is joined by an exquisite roundel by Hans Memling, estimate £3–4 million, one of the last and finest devotional works by the artist remaining in private hands; a beautiful panel by Sandro Botticelli and Associate, estimate £2–3 million, never before seen in public and one of only two known versions of his celebrated Madonna del Roseto; an intimate Virgin and Child by Bernard van Orley, estimate £1.5–2 million; a rural landscape by Paulus Potter, estimate £2–3 million, painted just a year before his celebrated The Young Bull; a lively village scene by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, estimate £2.5–3.5 million, considered one of his finest autonomous compositions; and a monumental 9ft work by Sir Edwin Landseer, estimate £3–4 million, the sister painting to the British icon The Monarch of the Glen. They are joined by a rare pair of views by William Hodges, estimate £300,000–500,000 each, from Captain Cook's second voyage, among the earliest Western painted records of the South Pacific, and an exquisite moonlit view of Venice by Ivan Aivazovsky, estimate £500,000–700,000, among many other remarkable works.
Preceding the Evening Auction, Sotheby's will stage a dedicated single-lot sale for the Hamilton Laocoön, estimate £2–3 million: one of only four known full-scale bronze casts of the ancient sculpture made up to that point, created in Paris in 1817 by a leading master of Neoclassicism with direct access to the original. Once owned by some of the most celebrated British collectors of the nineteenth century, it comes to the market for the first time in nearly 150 years.
The paintings sales will be complemented by the annual dedicated auction of Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries. Headlining that sale is a spectacular self-portrait by the foremost portraitist of Restoration England, Sir Peter Lely, until very recently in the possession of the artist’s descendants. Also to be offered are two highly significant drawings by another 17th-century immigrant to England, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, totally different from each other in approach and degree of finish: one is a dramatic, rapid study, the only known sketch by Rubens for the decoration of his own house in Antwerp, while the other is an elaborate modello relating to a major altarpiece of the Crucifixion. The sale will also include drawings by the British masters, J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Gainsborough, and a magnificent pastel of a lion, by Eugène Delacroix.
INSIDE THE EXHIBITION
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Let The Little Children Come Unto Me
Estimate: £8–12m
Let The Little Children Come Unto Me - a rare and fascinating early history painting, executed by the young Rembrandt when he was in his early twenties, which provides an unparalleled insight into the practices and preoccupations that were to define his celebrated career.
A highly ambitious ‘history’ painting, inspired by the biblical story in which Christ blesses children just as he blesses adults, the work is nonetheless particularly personal, bringing together not only a lively self-portrait of the young artist, but also depictions of familiar figures identified as his mother and father and other figures drawn from his close family circle who appear singly in other works. In no other image does Rembrandt bring his family together so completely. See key below.
At the same time, recent restoration of the painting – involving the removal of confusing later additions to the original, unfinished image - has thrown crisp light onto Rembrandt’s working practice. For reasons we may never know, having worked up the figures and architectural elements in the upper part of the composition in great detail, Rembrandt ultimately left the foreground of the painting unfinished, offering an unusually transparent record of the artist’s method - particularly when it came to history paintings - of working from the back of a canvas towards the foreground.
Hans Memling
The Virgin Mary Nursing the Christ Child
Estimate: £3-4m
This roundel, small enough to be held in one hand, depicts an extraordinary moment of intimacy and maternal tenderness. Datable to 1485–90, it offers a porthole into the world of late fifteenth-century Bruges, its private devotional practices, associated art market, and - most significantly - the skill and artistic enterprise of Hans Memling, the leading painter in the city at the time. Works of this quality and age, well over five hundred years old, appear exceedingly rarely on the open market. A mere handful of paintings attributed to Memling’s workshop, and even fewer considered to be fully autograph, have been sold over the last half century. It is one of the last and finest devotional works by Memling to remain in private ownership.
Sir Edwin Landseer
Scene in Braemar
Estimate: £3-4m
Monumental in scale and charged with the drama of the Scottish Highlands, Sir Edwin Landseer’s Scene in Braemar is the culmination of the artist's lifelong fascination with the Highland stag. The nearly nine-foot canvas has long been understood as a darker and more mysterious sister painting to The Monarch of the Glen - Landseer’s iconic image of the Highland stag, and one of the most recognisable symbols of British art.
Widely admired as among “the best works of the artist” when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857, Scene in Braemar has remained one of the most celebrated compositions by Landseer, often dubbed the “King of animal painters”. The painting distils everything he loved about the untamed beauty of the Highlands. Unseen in public for over two decades, the painting represents the culmination of an idea that had occupied Landseer for more than thirty years.
Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, called Sandro Botticelli, and Associate
The Virgin and Child with the young Saint John the Baptist
Estimate: £2-3m
This beautiful panel, never before seen in public, is one of only two known versions of The Madonna and Child with the infant Saint John the Baptist, sometimes known as the Madonna del Roseto, “Madonna of the Rose Garden” - long counted among Botticelli's most famous early compositions. For more than a century, the prime original has been understood to be the slightly larger panel in the Musée du Louvre, painted around 1468–69. But new technical research suggests that the present work is far more than a later echo: it may in fact have been created alongside the Louvre painting, in Botticelli's own studio, at the very same moment.
First recorded as a Botticelli in the mid-nineteenth century, when it hung in the Livorno collection of Francesco de Larderel, Count of Montecerboli, the painting remained virtually unknown until 1946, when it was rediscovered by the great Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, who hailed it as "a very important addition to the early work of Botticelli". Though later scholarship quietly reassigned the panel to Botticelli's workshop, recent examination has revealed a fascinatingly intimate relationship between the two paintings, and significant changes made during the earliest stages of this work point to Botticelli's own hand shaping the composition as it evolved, offering a rare window onto the young artist at work and the close-knit world of the assistants and associates who painted alongside him in late 1460s Florence.
William Hodges, R.A.
View of Vaitepiha Bay, Tahiti and View of Owharre [Fare] Harbour, Huahine
Estimate: £300,000 - 500,000 each
Painted in 1777, shortly after Captain Cook's three-year second voyage to the Southern Ocean, this rare pair of views ranks among the earliest Western painted records of the South Pacific. The Tahiti view is one of only three known oil paintings of the subject by Hodges, the other two now in museum collections; the Huahine view is similarly rare. In 1772, Hodges, a former theatre scenery painter trained in the studio of Richard Wilson, had been appointed by the Admiralty as the official artist on the voyage, becoming the first professionally trained Western painter to document the islands of the South Pacific. David Attenborough has called him "the most unjustly neglected British painter of the eighteenth century".
Part of a set of six views from the voyage that remained together in the same English family collection since the mid-nineteenth century, the pair have been exhibited publicly just once in their 250-year history. The set is believed to have first belonged to Sir William Foulis, a Yorkshire landowner whose estates lay close to Great Ayton, where Cook spent part of his childhood, raising the tantalising possibility that the works were commissioned by, or presented to, Foulis in recognition of that connection. The Huahine view in particular captures the anchorage from which, on Cook's return the following year, Omai, the Tahitian who would become the toast of Georgian London joined the crew of the Adventure for its voyage home.
Created at a moment when Tahiti, first reached by Europeans only a decade earlier, was taking Europe by storm as a seemingly untouched paradise that fed directly into Enlightenment thinking around figures such as Rousseau, Hodges' views were among the very first images to bring this newly encountered world to life. They are exceptionally rare in private hands today.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger
Village scene with peasants carousing and dancing around a maypole
Estimate: £2.5 - 3.5 million
Populated with a rich cast of characters and depicting one of the most popular feast days in the medieval calendar, the feast day of Saint George. Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s Maypole Dance, dating from the 1620s, is one of the best examples of Brueghel's independent compositions - and when last sold, nearly 30 years ago, set an auction record for the artist.
While best known for replicating the now-lost inventions of his father, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Brueghel the Younger here demonstrates striking originality, developing a dynamic composition that both honours and extends the family tradition, while its vivid colour and observational wit - though partly indebted to his father’s compositional devices - are distinctly his own. Exceptionally well preserved, the panel may be considered the prime version of this composition, of which only a small group of fully autograph examples - no more than seven or nine - are known to survive. The painting stands as a work of considerable importance within Brueghel’s oeuvre, embodying both his inheritance and his individuality within the great dynasty of Netherlandish painting.
Bernard Van Orley
Virgin and Child
Estimate: £1.5 - 2 million
This exquisite and highly refined panel, c.1518, by Bernard van Orley, one of the most important painters and tapestry designers active in Brussels and Antwerp in the first half of the 16th century, is executed in the same year that Van Orley was engaged by Margaret of Austria, Regent of The Netherlands. The walls of her Royal Palace of Coudenberg in Brussels, which no longer stand, are seen through the open window. Beyond can be seen the Church of Sainte Gudule, very much as it appears today. The painting reflects the rarefied culture of her court. Though he never travelled to Italy, Van Orley emerges here as one of the earliest and most accomplished interpreters of Italian Renaissance ideals in Northern Europe.
Conceived on an intimate scale as a portable aid to private devotion, the work rewards close inspection with its wealth of detail, from the beautifully rendered and legible prayer book to the rich furnishings that would have resonated with an elite, courtly audience.
Giovanni Antonio Guardi
The Greek Favourite in the Harem
Estimate: £200,000 - 300,000
Painted in the early 1740s and conceived as part of an extraordinary decorative cycle, Giovanni Antonio Guardi’s The Greek Favourite in the Harem, is among the best of eighteenth-century Venetian turquerie. The painting demonstrates Guardi’s great ability to evoke an imagined Ottoman interior - despite the artist never having travelled to Turkey.
Unseen in public for over three decades and making its auction debut, the work forms part of a celebrated series of forty-three canvases depicting Turkish history, customs and courtly life, commissioned between 1741 and 1743 by Field Marshal Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, one of the most important patrons in eighteenth-century Venice. A former adversary of the Ottoman Empire, Schulenburg developed a deeply personal fascination with Turkish culture following his military career, notably after his victory at the Siege of Corfu in 1716. Drawing on compositions by the Flemish-French artist Jean-Baptiste Vanmour, the series represents a nuanced and highly imaginative European interpretation of Ottoman life. Today, fewer than half of the original forty-three paintings are known, with around twenty examples currently accounted for, and works from the series rarely appear on the market. Only eight have been offered at auction in the past thirty-five years.
Hendrick Goltzius
Christ as the Living Tree with Ecclesia
Estimate: £800,000 - £1.2m
Hendrick Goltzius established his reputation as a draughtsman and printmaker long before he began to produce paintings around 1600. This panel, executed in 1610, is one of fewer than sixty paintings he produced over the final seventeen years of his career. It shows a pronounced Italianate character, evident in the warm tonality, elongated figures and diagonal composition. Iconographically complex and rare in Dutch art, the work presents a meditation on Christ’s sacrifice and the promise of salvation.
Henry Nelson O'Neil, A.R.A.
The Standard-Bearer: A Portrait of Rajaram Roy (1817–c. 1850), son of Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833)
Estimate: £200,000 - 300,000
The Standard-Bearer commemorates the homecoming of the young Bengali Rajaram Roy, then just twenty-one, after eight years in exile. Rajaram was the son of Raja Ram Mohun Roy, the pioneering Bengali journalist, social and religious reformer, and educational activist hailed by contemporaries as 'the sun of India', and today widely regarded as the 'Father of the Indian Renaissance' and a founding figure of modern India. Co-founder of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, Ram Mohun championed a vision that married Western-influenced modernity with the emergence of Indian nationalism.
A critical admirer of the West, Ram Mohun was appointed Ambassador to Britain in 1830 by the Mughal Emperor Akbar II, bringing the young Rajaram with him to England. Following his father's untimely death in 1833, Rajaram remained in London for a further six years before returning to Calcutta in 1839. Painted on the eve of that return, O'Neil's startlingly original portrait casts Rajaram as the bearer of his father's reforming ideals, and offers an early glimpse of the singular gift for storytelling and precise expression that would come to define O'Neil's later career.
Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky
Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore
Estimate: £500,000 - 700,000
Ivan Aivazovsky first arrived in Venice from Russia in the summer of 1840, at the start of the decade that would bring him fame and recognition across both his homeland and Europe. Dated 1847, this exquisite moonlit view was painted only a few years after his extended Italian sojourn, when his impressions of the city were still fresh. Lit by a full moon reflected in the tranquil lagoon, with the gates of San Giorgio Maggiore glowing softly in the distance and a lone gondola gliding past, it is a fine example of the Romantic nocturnes that proved so popular with the public and critics alike, and which remain among his most sought-after works today.
Paulus Pietersz. Potter
Landscape with Animals and a Woman Milking a Cow
Estimate: £2 - 3m
Coming to the market for the first time in almost 140 years, this work was painted just one year after Paulus Potter’s most famous composition, the monumental The Young Bull, which recently returned to view at the Mauritshuis in The Hague following conservation. Created during the brief yet accomplished decade of the artist’s career, the picture exemplifies Potter’s distinctive vision of the Dutch countryside. Set at the hour of melkuur, when cattle are brought in for milking, the scene unfolds in the warm light of a summer afternoon, with low viewpoints and gently rising ground. Animated by resting livestock, a watchful cow, and the milkmaid in her vivid red coat anchoring the composition.
Michiel van Musscher
An interior scene with Eva Visscher, the artist’s wife, with a child in her lap and another child in a cot, beside them a Dog
Estimate: £200,000 - £300,000
Precisely dated 30 March 1683, this intimate domestic scene is revealed as something far more layered than a simple genre interior. The carefully observed setting - complete with still-life details and richly rendered fabrics - suggests a prosperous household, yet subtle compositional cues draw the viewer deeper. A diagonal formed by a broom leads the eye to a painting on the back wall, a self-portrait of Michiel van Musscher, identifying the scene as a portrait of the artist’s own family, including his first wife, Eva Visscher, and their children.
Renowned today for his genre scenes, Van Musscher was equally accomplished as a portraitist, and this painting brings together both strands of his practice. At once a family portrait, a self-portrait, and a masterfully constructed interior, it carries a strong emotional resonance. It appears that the picture remained in the artist’s collection until after his death; the first lot in his posthumous sale is described as ‘A woman with a child on her lap, another sitting in a cradle (artfully painted) by M. v. Musscher’. Acquired thereafter by his patron Jonas Witsen, the work stands as a deeply personal and sophisticated example of Van Musscher’s art.
