Sotheby’s Masters Week: Market Movers and Masterpieces

It’s Masters Week at Sotheby’s New York! Over the next seven days, constituting an “unmissable event at the beginning of the year’s sale calendar,” Masters Week promises to draw “worldwide clientele to New York” for the very best the art world has to offer. Presented in partnership with Qatar Executive, Masters Week will feature 11 high-profiles sales of paintings, drawings, sculpture, instruments, ceramics, and rare objects spanning six centuries of artistic genius. 

The sale will kick off on February 5th at 10am EST, with the Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries sale, which includes landscape drawings by Claude Lorrain and JMW Turner, among other fantastic works. Later that day, the 19th Century European Art sale will take center stage, offering maritime, landscape, and genre paintings by leading Barbizon, Netherlandish, Italian, Spanish, and British painters along with a select array of Neoclassical drawings and sketches. A featured work in this auction is Julien Dupré’s Rye Reapers, in Picardy (Les Faucheurs de seigle, en Picardie), which was exhibited at the 1877 Paris Salon.

The live flagship auction, Master Paintings Part I, opens day two of the sale series and presents 53 lots for auction, including an oil sketch by Peter Paul Rubens, one of Raphael’s early works, and Nest Robber by Pieter Brueghel, a work that Sotheby’s notes is “one of his rarests compositions.” Other notable artists included in this sale are Lucas Cranach the Elder, Nicolas Régnier, Louise Moillon, and Gustave Courbet. The second part of this auction, Master Paintings Part II, contains an exceptional group of works from distinguished institutions like the Bass Musuem of Art in Miami Beach and collections from Connecticut and New York. This auction, which offers “a selection of paintings…without reserve,” will also bring together renowned Old Master paintings by Pieter Claesz, the Circle of Diego Velázquez, Titian, and Jacob Salomonsz van Ruysdael and sketches by Eugène Delacroix, Adriaen van Ostade, and the Dutch School.

Day three of the auction, February 7th, will hold four separate auctions, including The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian | Master Paintings & Sculpture, The Joachim-Ma Stradivarius | A Masterpiece of Sound, The One, and Master Sculpture & Works of Art. In the Master Paintings and Sculpture auction, Sotheby’s highlights one of the most prolific single-owner collections from Aso O. Tavitian, a Bulgarian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. Among the collection is Portrait of Margaret of Asturia by the Master of the Magdalene Legend, William Bouguereau’s Study for La tasse de lait, and Émile-Louis Truffot’s bronze Amazone Lybienne (Libyan Amazon). The next auction only has 1 lot for sale: The Joachim-Ma Violin made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona, Italy in 1714. Perhaps the most exciting sale on February 7th is The One, a sale that is “centered by superlative objects that transcends time and place,” spanning close to 2,000 years of artistic ingenuity. In this auction, Roman busts, George III silver trays, and a Fabergé Nephrite Elephant will be sold alongside Kobe Bryant’s Kobe 8 Sneakers and Muhammed Ali’s “Thrilla in Manila” Everlast Shorts. To close off the day, the Master Sculputre & Works of Art sale offers almost 80 lots of incredible works of sculpture and ceramics from the Byzantine, Romanesque, Medeival, and Early Modern periods, covering Italian, Spanish, French, Austrian and Southern Netherlandish craftsmen.

February 8th and 9th will see auctions pertaining to Tavitian’s collections from his townhouse and country house. The auction house calls Tavitian a “modern-day Maecenas,” referencing Octavian’s political advisor and Vergil’s and Horace’s patron, and a “remarkable reincarnation of the great New York connoisseur-philanthropists of a century ago,” like J.P Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and William Vanderbilt. In The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian | The Townhouse sale, Sotheby’s will offer a collection of furniture, paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts from Tavitian’s Beaux-Arts townhouse in Manhattan. The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian | The Country House features works from Tavitian’s house in the Berkshire Hills in Western Massachusetts, including English furniture and needlework, Chinese and Japanese art, and Old Master paintings and sculpture.

 Finally, to conclude the auction and Tavitian sale series, Sotheby’s will offer an online auction on February 10th, which brings together a selection of furniture and other objects from Tavitian’s “inexhaustible” collection. From Netherlandish lion sculptures to Elizabethan caryatids, each of the 309 lots in this sale will close independently at one-minute intervals, with closure times subject to change. 

After seven jam-packed days of numbers, masterpieces, and –, there is no doubt that the auction house will break records. In an email blast that Sotheby’s sent out confirming the auction dates in September 2024, they highlighted their recent successes at Masters Week 2024, which “achieved $61.3 million in total sales, with 11 works selling for over $1 million. A handful of star lots emerged from the sale series, including Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun's Self-Portrait In Traveling Costume, which sold for nearly $3.1 million.” In total, Masters Week comprises over 1300 lots, most of which will be open for viewing at Sotheby’s new York galleries at 1334 York Ave from February 1st through February 7th. The auction house has also organized two presentations corresponding with the auction, including the New Exhibitions of Old Master Drawings: Conversations with Curators presentations and panel aiscussion and The Legacy of Aso O. Tavitian: Collector, Philanthropist and Connoisseur presentation, which both happened on February 2nd. 

Out of the 1300+ exceptional lots offered for sale this week, here are just a selection of the highlights!

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Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries 

5 February, 11am EST, Live

As the first sale of the week, the Master Works on Paper from Five Centuries sale will present drawings, watercolors, gouaches and pastels that “chart in fascinating ways the development of the art of drawing in Europe over the centuries, and the great variety of functions that this many-faceted art form served,” as the auction house writes in the their introduction to the sale. While landscapes take center stage in this auction, the sale also features many drawings and group sketches.

The six studies of heads on the recto of this drawing, according to Sotheby’s, are “clearly a product of the Bruges school, and strongly demonstrate the stylistic influence of the city’s greatest master of the late 15th and early 16th century.” Though silverpoint was an unforgiving medium, the artist of this work demonstrates considerable skill and knowledge in this rare drawing that, outside the collections of renowned museums, is unheard of. Though experts are hesitant to attribute the drawing to Gerard David, the landscape sketch on the drawing’s verso represents a subtly different “handling and the facial physiognomy of the figures,” which seems very Italianate and invokes Titian’s, and his circle’s, drawings and prints. This drawing is estimated to fetch between $250,000 and $350,000 at auction.

JMW Turner’s 1841 watercolor (estimate: $250,000-$350,000) is from the artist’s travels to Switzerland, which encompass a period of Turner’s life filled with “spontaneity, energy and drama,” which are clearly seen in this work. Strikingly, the auction house notes that this watercolor of Schaffhausen “is one of ten watercolors of this subject that were painted by Turner in 1841 and that are all likely to have originated from the same sketchbook,” with the rest now in the collections of the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, the Tate Britain, the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, and the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey. Formerly in the collection of Sir Donald Currie, a passionate Turner collector, this watercolor captures the artist’s mastery over depicting fleeting changes in light, atmosphere, and water through this dreamy landscape. 

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19th-Century European Art 

5 February, 2pm EST, Live

The 19th-Century European Art sale will feature paintings by Netherlandish, Italian, Spanish, British, and French painters, including Belle Époque masterpieces, scenes of rural life, genre scenes, maritime scenes, and exquisite landscape paintings. Some esteemed artists to note in this sale include Édouard Toudouze, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Daniel Ridgway Knight, and Eugen von Blaas.

Debuting at the Paris Salon at just 19-years-old with mythological and historical paintings that were held in high regard at the time, Toudouze’s modern genre scene at the beach “celebrates this shift [in the categorization of the coast as a vacation destination] and the cast of characters that in their self-fashioning personify all things modern.” Figures of women—both children and older—dominate this composition, as critics were quick to note the explicit references to the consumer culture and attitudes of Belle Époque Paris at play in this work. In fact, Edmond Jumel, a reviewer of the work, wrote: “They are Parisians to the tips of their fingernails…She does not look at you, this woman, but the entire way in which she presents herself is so stirring that when one sees her, one wants to see her again—so much so that one sees only her.” From the subtle Japonisme to the explicit references to Jumeau Bébés and advertisements in La Vie Parisienne, Toudouze’s painting depicts a stunning moment of la vie moderne, highlighting both a slower pace of life and the bustling pace of the cityscape in 19th-century France. This painting is expected to sell at $400,000-$600,000.

The French Realist painter, Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, was known for his naturalistic depictions of peasants at work in rural landscapes and The Gleaners (estimate: $150,000-$200,000 is no exception. Looking to his contemporaries, like Millet, Corot, and Daubigny for inspiration for his “humble subjects,” Lhermitte’s work “lends a sense of lived experience to the otherwise highly composed arrangement of modest figures in the rural agrarian landscape.” With larger-than-life figures who appear pressed against the frame of the painting, Lhermitte invites the viewer to take a step into his work and imagine themselves next to the exhausted workers, whose muted clothing stands out in the field of haystacks depicted in varying hues of yellow and brown.

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Master Paintings Part I

6 February, 10am EST, Live

Perhaps the most exciting sale of the series, the Master Paintings Part I sale includes extraordinary works of art from late-14th through early-20th centuries. This sale features property from the Hans and Marion König Collection, which was “judiciously selected” and arranged between 1980 and 1990, and features Old Master paintings, textiles, Asian art, 20th-century European paintings and sculpture, works by the Russian avant-garde, and modern sculpture, among others. Other collections featured in this auction include those from the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, FL, which encompass 5 religious and mythological scenes ranging from Ferdinand Bol’s Venus and Adonis to Giovanni Mazone’s Madonna and Child polyptych.

For Peter Paul Rubens, his oil sketches were not just “means to an end.” His Annunciation sketch (estimate: $4,000,000-$6,000,000), which was a preliminary study for his Antwerp altarpiece, gives the viewer insight into his integral creative and thought processes. As the Virgin Mary kneels before the altar bench, seemingly unaware of the Angel Gabriel behind her, two putti occupy the upper right of the work, their hands blurred in a flurry of movement. Rubens’ “unfiltered genius” shines through this sketch, which was refined and adjusted before Rubens placed the finishing touches on his canvas. Some of the major changes made to this work include adjusting the composition to suit a curved top, modifying the Virgin Mary’s kneeling pose and the positions of the putti, and transforming the blue spots of paint that the putti drop into thornless roses, a sign of the Immaculate Conception. 

Raphael, according to Sotheby’s, may have painted this work, which depicts Mary Magdalene, when he was just 20 years old. A hallmark of his “precocious talent,” Raphael’s Mary Magdalene is serene and tranquil as she clasps her hands in prayer and her body follows a subtle, yet sinuous, S-curve that leads the viewer’s eye from her gilded halo to the tips of her right toes. This panel was originally part of a triptych as an altarpiece for private devotion, but the middle piece is now lost and the left piece, portraying Saint Catherine, is at the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino. Between 1500 and 1505, when most scholars place the creation date of this piece, Raphael appears to have executed many panels of Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Catherine, along with the Mond Crucifixion, an altarpiece installed in the Città di Castello's Church of San Domenico. This piece is expected to fetch $2,000,000 to $3,000,000 at auction.

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Master Paintings Part II

6 February, 2pm EST, Live

Part II to the Master Paintings sale features works spanning “periods, genres, and geographics” with “elegant view paintings, evocative still lifes, academic oil sketches, and important portraits, the auction also includes a selection of paintings offered without reserve.” With 98 lots in total and 5 works that formerly belonged to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, this auction promises to be an exceptional one, expect to see paintings attributed to the circle of Diego Velázquez, the Lombard School, the Florentine School, and followers of Canaletto. 

In this composition, the meaty flesh of the roast fowl constitutes the center of a lively still life scene. Surrounding the roast fowl are a carp’s head and lobster in the pewter place in the lower right, a plate of currants and a radish in the lower left, a load of bread, a large drinking glass known as a roemer, and an earthenware jug, all of which sit atop a white tablecloth, which still bears the impressions of its folded storage state. The way in which Flegel conceives his still life (estimate: $80,000-$120,000), as an “unadorned presentation and unpretentious simplicity,” is “a recurring feature in his compositions, often bisected by diagonal elements, such as the knife and white radish, ingeniously placed in order to increase the overall illusion of three-dimensionality.” Dr. Anne-Dore Ketelsen-Volkhardt, who wrote a monograph and catalogue raisonné on Flegel’s works, dated the work to the early 17th century and believes that certain elements in this work (including the bread roll, earthenware jug, and knife) were added later to balance the composition. 

While other works in the Master Paintings Part II depict the same vista, this painting (estimate: $40,000-$60,000) creates an illusion on the viewer’s eye, as though they are standing in front of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute and the Biblioteca Marciana, surveying this exceptional vista of Venice on a clear day. As this work was created by a follower of Canaletto, there is no doubt that it draws inspiration from Canaletto’s many depictions of this view, which have the same painterly quality and attention to detail as this marvelous canvas. 

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The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian | Master Paintings & Sculpture

7 February, 10am EST, Live

Sotheby’s describes the collection of Aso O. Tavitian, with regard to his master paintings and sculpture, as “a masterclass in taste and quality…exemplif[ying] the breadth of his appreciation for art as well as his unerring standards for excellence.” While many of the works in this sale are of the human figure, including portraits, they too created a “lively and interactive atmosphere” in Tavitian’s homes. In this sale, the works comprise a wide geographical area and temporal period, including 15th century Netherlandish and 18th century English portraits. 

The Portrait of Margaret of Austria (estimate: $1,500,000-$2,000,000) depicts the princess in a “sumptuous gown and adorned with an elegant headdress and jewels,” with all the accolades that befit her role as a Habsburg princess in her youth and foreshadowed her position as Princess of Asturias, Duchess of Savoy, and Governess of the Burgundian Low Countries, as well as leading patroness of the arts in her future. In her prolific art collection, Margaret owned works like Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait and those of her Burgundian fore bearers, along with rare illuminated manuscripts, such as the Trés Riches Heures. Though the auction house cannot pinpoint the exact circumstance under which the portrait was commissioned, they note that it was “likely conceived from within the courtly tradition of portrait exchange” or could have “arisen from within the courtly traditions of families exchanging portraits of prospective marital partners.” Regardless of the reason for its commission however, this portrait “remains today a defining likeness of a young woman who would leave an indelible mark on Europe’s political and cultural landscape.”

In the 15th century, images of Saint Mary Magdalene enjoyed great popularity—a tradition that Ambrosious Benson followed through his own portrait of the saint. In this work (estimate: $600,000-$800,000), the artist intertwines northern Italian artistic sensibilities with “the precision and delicacy of Netherlandish art,” a testament to the artist’s “rare ability to fuse his roots in Lombardy with the elite courtly taste of Bruges, where he spent his career.” Other than its exquisite use of color and texture to portray Saint Mary Magdalene, the auction house calls attention to the gold brooch on Mary Magdalene’s dress and the ornate illuminated manuscript “decorated with a Flemish “scatter” border.” Interestingly enough, and unique to this painting, the saint’s brooch contains a fleur-de-lys which, according to Sotheby’s, suggests that the patron perhaps “enjoyed a special association with France.” 

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The Joachim-Ma Stradivarius | A Masterpiece of Sound

7 February, 11:15am EST, Live

The only item available for auction in this sale is the Joachim-Ma Stradivarius (estimate: $12,000,000-$18,000,000), an instrument of “exceptional historical significance” made by Antonio Stradivari in 1714, which is deemed his  “Golden Period.” The name given to this violin, the Joachim-Ma, is not an arbitrary one, for it is named after its two previous owners, the Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) and the celebrated Chinese violinist Si-Hon Ma (1925-2009). This violin is offered by the New England Conservatory, where Ma studied with one of Joachim’s pupils, and all proceeds from this sale are dedicated to student scholarships. There is no doubt that this instrument carries an extraordinary legacy, not just from its storied provenance but the stories of craftsmanship, both artisanal and artistic, carried within. 

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The One

7 February, 11:30am EST, Live

This extraordinary auction features exceptional items from the course of human history, ranging from ancient times to the present day. All the objects included in this sale are those that “define human ingenuity, achievement, and excellence,” including a Roman Imperial bust from the 1st century and the Everlast shorts that Muhammad Ali wore during his famous 1975 “Thrilla in Manila” fight. 

On one of the many occasions when King Edward III invited Fabergé to his court to “review various objects of vertu,” he did not choose anything, which concerned the employees of Fabergé London. However, one certain hippopotamus cigar-lighter in nephrite caught the king’s eye as it was “‘half the price, and it is amusing!’” As the Sotheby’s catalogue essay records its illustrious provenance—it passed through the hands of Captain James Larnach, Agnes Keyser (the king’s long-time mistress), Queen Alexandra, the Berry-Hill Galleries, Raymond Schlager, and The Peltier Collection—they underscore that “royally provenanced Fabergé lighter appears as an exciting rediscovery.” The cigar lighter is expected to sell between $100,000 to $150,000. 

“‘If you see me in a fight with a bear, prey for the bear,’” wrote Kobe Bryant in a Facebook post following his injury after the April 12, 2013 game against Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors. As Sotheby’s aptly expresses in their catalogue essay for this lot, “there is no moment in Kobe’s career more emblematic of the ‘Mamba Mentality’ than ‘The Achilles Game.” Bryant’s legacy, not just through his athletic career and mentorship, but also through his mentality and perseverance, continues to inspire athletes and non-athletes alike across the globe. “Unrelenting, unforgiving, determined, and ultimately demanding,” the Mamba Mentality lives on. These 2013 Nike Kobe 8 Elite “Lakers Home” shoes are expected to sell between $600,000 and $800,000 during Friday’s auction.

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Master Sculpture & Works of Art

7 February, 2pm EST, Live

As the auctioneers take the rostrum for the Master Sculpture & Works of Art sale, the items presented in the auction room span 6 centuries of Gothic wood and stone carvings, Renaissance sculpture, Kunstkamer works, Baroque bronze sculptures, and Neoclassical marbles. As the auction house writes in their introduction to this sale, the items offered “provide collectors with an opportunity to build or add to their collections with an array of objects showcasing a variety of media and techniques.”

This bust of Benjamin Franklin, the American polymath, diplomat, and Founding Father, is one of the first portrait-busts that Houdon made. Having modeled other illustrious 18th-century Americans and European nobility of the Enlightenment, Houdon, who is also known for his full-length sculpture of George Washington, was a fine choice to sculpt Franklin. The Louvre, according to the auction house, preserves a terracotta bust of Franklin—comprising Houdon’s first portrait of the statesman—while the Met and the Philadelphia Museum of Art house two marble busts. This plaster portrait-bust was once in the collection of the Rockefellers and is expected to fetch between $200,000 and $400,000 at auction.

The Madonna di via Pietrapiana (estimate: $40,000-$60,000) was the subject of a lot of artistic and scholarly discourse with regards to its origins. Further analysis in 1985, during restoration, revealed that this panel “was modelled on a wooden board by the artist [Donatello] and it is…the sculpture from which all replicas derive.” Some scholars believe that Donatello either “modelled the prototype shortly after his return to Florence” or even had this piece sent from Florence to Venice. In any case, the tender relationship between the Virgin Mary and Jesus in this composition is a poignant one, for the cherubic child nestles underneath his mother’s chin as he cuddles her left shoulder. That the Virgin Mary’s mantle is held together with a seraph is an important point to note, for a similar feature arises in Donatello’s Virgin of the High Altar from the church of Sant’Antonio, Padua, the Verona Madonna, the small roundel of the Miracle of the Newborn Child in the Basilica of St. Anthony, and the Chellini Madonna.

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The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian | The Townhouse

8 February, 10am EST, Live

For the Townhouse sale of Tavitian’s collection, the auction house is proud to present works of sculpture, art, and furniture that offer bidders a rare opportunity to “travel back to a vanished era and acquire a portion of this evanescent evocation of the Gilded Age interiors of the past.” While most of the works in this collection have since been bequeathed to other institutions, those that remain in this sale are the product of Tavinian’s “unwavering instinct and critical eye and wholeheartedly enlisting the advice and guidance of dealers and auction house experts,” resulting in a “flawless symbiosis of fine and decorative arts spread over multiple floors.”

These remarkable chairs (estimate: $120,000-$180,000) have “broad proportions and crisply carved serpentine mahogany frames typify the output of their likely creator, Thomas Chippendale.” Chippendale himself, in his publication, describes these type of chairs as “French Elbow Chairs,” which were “depicted covered in imitation tapestry or needlework of Chinese or Indian inspiration.” Once presumably belonging to the collection of the Earl of Dumfries, “arguably one of the most significant bodies of furniture design in the English rococo tradition,” the pair of chairs made their way into Tavinian’s collection in 2007, after he purchased them during an auction at Christie’s.

These set of five blue and white “European subject” vases (estimate: $100,000-$150,000) are a rare find, for it is unusual to “find a complete garniture of this decoration including beakers” in a collection. The intricate lines and floral motifs on each vase swirl around most of the vase, save for the decorative bands and circles in the middle of each open vase and covered jar, respectively. Noticeably, the panels that adorn the vases seem to be based on “four panels depicting noblewomen with hair styled after the Duchesse de Fontanges, mistress of King Louis XIV,” three of which can be traced back to engravings by the Bonnart brothers, who were “renowned at the time for their prints portraying the ever-changing fashion of European high society.”

The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian | The Country House

9 February, 10am EST, Live

In the final live sale of this auction series, the auction house will offer the treasures of the warm and inviting rooms of Tavitian’s “own contemporary ‘cottage’ in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts,” which invited “quiet contemplation of present and past eras in a magnificent Berkshires landscape.” In this sale, esteemed works of English furniture and needlework, Chinese and Japanese works of art and great Old Master pictures and sculpture take center stage, among other surprising, and sometimes unexpected, lots.

Each of Carpeaux’s group of La Danse sculptures, according to Sotheby’s, was “made as one of the four monumental reliefs on the façade of the Paris Opéra.” While the sculptor drew from a variety of sources to create his work, scandal struck as the original sculpture group (housed today in the Museé d’Orsay) was vandalized by ink. Thus, Carpeaux attempted to recoup his losses, for he “risked his own fortune in creating La Danse,” by isolating “individual elements from the relief as independent works in a variety of materials.” This bust, the Genius of the Dance (estimate: $40,000-$60,000), is “reminiscent of a dancing flame” and successfully “places the creation of the present plaster between the final realisation of La Danse and the sculptor’s plans for its related editions of individual subjects” through the drapery, which was meant to “replace that which floated behind the original figure.”

While the most unexpected item in this sale, the 1973 Jaguar E-Type Series 3 V-12 Roadster is a classic. Representing Jaguar’s shift from sports car to grand tourer, this car contains “newly developed 5.3-liter V-12 engine rated at 272 horsepower and capable of propelling the Series 3 E-Type to 60 mph in under seven seconds” and other stylistic elements to make travel more comfortable for its occupants. The British racing green exterior with the tan interior makes for a perfect combination as, at 38,225 miles, this exquisite car is “ a great candidate for a restoration or for those who prefer originality and some patina, the car could be enjoyed as is, after a mechanical recommissioning.”

The Vision of Aso O. Tavitian | The Online Sale

11 February, 10am EST, Online

And to close it all up is the Online Sale of Tavitian’s collection, which comprises “a selection of furniture and objects across multiple categories from both houses that reflects the breadth and diversity of his vision.” Though he had already filled his Manhattan townhouse and Massachusetts country home with his most treasured finds, Tavitian always had room for more and “always [found] space for a new acquisition – a trait he shared with all of history’s art lovers.”

While there is not much information about the condition or design of this carpet on the auction essay, Tabriz rugs “are known for their intricate designs, which often feature a central medallion surrounded by floral or geometric motifs.” Tabriz, one of the most important commercial centers on the Silk Road, was an important place of cultural exchange in the Islamic world. Tabriz rugs, such as this one, are known for their impressive quality, materials, incredible durability, and intricacy of design, which appears to depict various real and mythical animals in a symmetrical landscape. This rug is expected to sell between $8,000 and $12,000, with a current bid at $4,000.

This Queen Anne Gilt Gesso Wall Mirror (estimate: $8,000-$12,000, current bid: $1,300) is strikingly beautiful, with the plumed cresting and foliate decoration throughout, bordering the surface of the mirror itself. At the crest of the mirror, there is a bevelled plate and shell apron, the most prominent features, and later brass candle arms (the plate is probably original) capping the bottom. 

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Well, the dawn of Masters Week is finally upon us and this sale of the season boasts an overarching selection of art that transcends time and geographical boundaries. As Old Masters concludes its international travels—having begun in Hong Kong on October 31, 2024 and stopped twice in Los Angeles from November 7-8, 2024 and London from November 29-December 3, 2024—the art world is waiting with bated breath for one of the biggest sale series of the season. If you happen to be in New York between now and February 7th, be sure to catch the lots on view at Sotheby’s New York before they head to auction. Check back after February 11th for the auction results!

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(Cover Image: Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Annunciation, 1628-1629, oil on panel via Sotheby’s New York)