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HomeAuctionsOld Master & British Drawings Including Property From The Cornelia Bessie Estate
Old Master & British Drawings Including Property From The Cornelia Bessie Estate
USD 3,915,500
Close rate: 100.00% (79/79)
49.4%
Above Est.
39.2%
Within Est.
11.4%
Below Est.
Auction introduction: This sale features works from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on drawings by some of the greatest eighteenth-century French artists. Highlights include Jean-Étienne Liotard’s Portrait of Philibert Cramer, one of Voltaire’s publishers, still owned by the sitter’s descendants; one of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s most enchanting red-chalk figure studies, Young woman dozing, from the Cornelia Bessie Estate; no less than thirteen sheets from Fragonard’s illustrations for Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the popular sixteenth-century epic poem, Property from the Collection of Nina R. and Arthur A. Houghton, Jr.; and a Study of the head of a woman by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, one of several drawings in the sale from The Collection of Nina Griscom. From the preceding century dates Laurent de La Hyre’s Binding of Isaac. Among the Italian drawings are such rare works as a sketch for a painting by the fifteenth-century Roman artist Antoniazzo Romano, and an architectural drawing by architect Vincenzo Scamozzi, the pupil of Palladio, as well as an energetic Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Northern drawings include Jan Siberecht’s Study of an old gnarled tree, a selection of works from the Rembrandt School, and a pastel family portrait by Cornelis Troost.