Christie’s set a new auction record for the 18th-century Venetian artist Canaletto on July 1st, when the painting Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day (ca. 1732) sold for £31.93 million ($43.91 million). The painting, which sold at the auction house’s London Old Masters evening sale, had been estimated to fetch more than $20 million. All sales figures include fees.
Measuring 86 by 138 centimeters, the painting, an early 18th-century view of Venice, is larger than any other major Canaletto painting to reach the market in the past two decades. According to The Art Newspaper, the work attracted five bidders across Asia, Europe, and North America.
The sale marks a significant rise from the previous auction high for the artist: The Grand Canal, Looking North-East from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge, which sold for £18.6 million ($32.74 million at the time) at Sotheby’s London in 2005. That price had stood as the record for Canaletto for nearly two decades.
Previously sold in 1993 at a Paris auction house for $10.24 million, Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day was later discovered to have belonged to Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister. The work was discovered in a 1736 inventory along with the painting of the Grand Canal that had previously held Canaletto’s auction record.
Maja Markovic, head of Christie’s Old Masters evening sale, London, noted the significance of this result in today’s art market: “The result of the Canaletto, which surpassed a record that stood for over two decades by more than £13 million [$17.75 million], is a testament to the painting’s exceptional quality and enduring appeal. It is the second highest price achieved for an Old Master at Christie’s London, surpassed only by Rubens’s Lot and His Daughters in 2016. This sale reaffirms the market’s confidence in well-priced works of rarity, importance and excellence that continue to captivate and inspire.”
The Christie’s Old Masters sale overall realized £55.26 million ($75.45 million), with a 99% sell-through rate by value (the percentage of the total estimated value of artworks that were sold)—the highest ever for an Old Masters sale at Christie’s London.
The evening also featured notable results for Willem Key’s Portrait of Margret Halseber of Basel, known as “The Lady with the Two Beards,” which sold for £882,000 ($1.2 million), and Gerrit Dou’s scene of a woman removing lice from a child’s head, which fetched £2 million ($2.73 million).
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