LONDON.- A complete set of Goya’s ‘La Tauromaquia’ led Sotheby’s sale of Prints & Multiples in London on 4 April 2017. Four determined bidders drove the final sale price to £512,750 ($637,400 / €598,840), in excess of the pre-sale estimate (£300,000-500,000). The thirty-three prints celebrating the Spanish master’s unique understanding of the art of bullfighting are virtually flawless examples of the first and only contemporary edition that was printed for Goya from large copperplates etched and aquatinted by him in 1815-1816. The set was recently found in a French ducal library when heirs of the original owner – a French ambassador at the court of Madrid during the early 18th century – were inspecting the family property, and pulled a large nondescript volume from the back of a library shelf. An initial inspection of the 19th-century ledger revealed ninety brightly coloured lithographs showing uniformed French military personnel. A glance beyond the two blank pages that followed – in what appeared to be a ‘scrapbook’ volume of prints – revealed the discovery: another series of prints, monochrome, warm, dark umber ink on freshly textured, handmade paper, immediately recognisable as masterpieces by the hand of Goya.

Séverine Nackers, Head of Prints, Sotheby’s Europe, said: “To find a complete set of Goya’s bullfighting prints with such historically significant provenance is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. The unique opportunity this sale represented was not lost on the four collectors whose determination took the bidding to an exceptional level.”

The sale also included 15 prints from the collection of Lord & Lady Attenborough featuring works by Picasso, Chagall, Cézanne, Matisse, Braque, Rouault, Toulouse-Lautrec and David Hockney, which sold for a combined total of £526,875. Since Sotheby’s first offered works from the Attenborough collection in 2009, every single lot has found a buyer, from Modern British and Impressionist & Modern art, to Picasso ceramics. This group of prints represented the final tranche of property from the collection of Lord & Lady Attenborough to come to auction across a series of sales in 2016 and 2017.

Yesterday’s auction brought an overall total of £3,271,500 ($4,066,802) against a pre-sale estimate of £2.3-3.5 million, with 83% of the lots sold.