7 Nice lots at Vanderkindere

Vanderkindere, from Belgium, sells on 29 and 30 April 2019 a nice selection of lots at their monthly auction.

One of these is lot 450, which is a painting they already offered twice before and which I discussed in a blog post from November 2017. It still has the wrong attribution (nothing to do with Honthorst, but circe of Passarotti instead), but at an estimated 1,000 Euro it still is a good buy.

UPDATE: sold for 2,400 Euro, whoever bought it now missed a chance to get it for half the price a year ago!

Other lots which caught my eye include:

*Lot 55, "Attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Younger", the village lawyer, estimated at 50,000 to 70,000 Euro. This work is known from multiple copies, some somewhat better than this one. Even so, this one seems not too expensive, as a very similar one (but smaller) sold at Bonham's in 2007 for £423,000 (and prices for this painter don't seem to have dropped since then).

Another version (better painted, worse condition) sold at Christie's in 2013 for £1,000,000!

And Sotheby's sold one in 2012 for 1,2 million pounds... Another good version can be found in the Museum of Ghent. All in all, the current estimate seems very cautious.

UPDATE: indeed, sold for 540,000 Euro!

*Lot 134 is a full series of allegories of the 4 elements by Jan Brueghel I. With an estimate of 150,000 to 180,000 Euro, it is one of the more expensive lots ever offered at this auction house, but it seems worth it. Paintings of the individual elements (the above order is fire, air, earth and water) can be found with some regularity at auction, and there is also a composition of this artist with all four elements in one painting: but full sets of four are rare. These ones are small, which explains why they are less detailed or precise than some examples in major museums. The "air" is a standard composition by Brueghel (who was often assisted by Hendrick van Balen in these works), the "fire" seems to be a lesser known variation though.

In 2010 Christie's sold another full set, for $2,200,000... These ones were clearly larger, better painted, and with an impressive provenance, so it's unlikely that the one for sale now will fetch the same. Still, it gives an idea of the importance of such a set.

UPDATE: sold for 135,000 Euro, so slightly below the estimate but still an impressive result.

*Lot 259 is a set of two paintings. Especially the first one, a "Christ healing the blind", seems to be the work of a very good artist (or a good copy after a very good painting), some master from the later Antwerp baroque style. If you happen to recognise the artist and believe it to be an original, I guess the estimate of 1,500 to 2,000 Euro may turn out to be a bargain.

UPDATE: sold for 1,400 Euro, so this didn't really catch the attention like I thought it would.

*Lot 360 is a portrait presumed to be of Christopher Packe, Lord Mayor of London in 1654. The painting isn't done terribly well, but it is historically interesting and I could not find a decent contemporary portrait painting of the man, so to find one in his mayoral robe and chain is a bonus.

He does have a magnificent sculpture on his tomb though (which I found on a blog about the Pack family history). Packe seems to have played a major role in the Cromwell story, so I guess this painting may be of special interest to people fascinated by this curious period in British history.

UPDATE: sold for 2,100 Euro against a 1,200 Euro estimate.

*Lot 381 is a better than usual, and less common than usual as well, Frans Francken II: a "liberation of Saint Peter" estimated at a very reasonable 2,000 Euro. I could find no other versions of this composition, which is painted very delicately.

UPDATE: sold for 5,800 Euro, painting was indeed clearly underestimated.

*Finally, lot 419, "School of the Master of Hoogstraeten" lamentation, with a 7,000 to 10,000 Euro estimate. I tried to find a better match, but so far failed to identify an artist for this work, which is very well preserved and has some very good detailing.

UPDATE: sold for 14,000 Euro.

The auction contains quite a few other interesting Flemish old masters, like a nice portrait from 1636 attributed to Cornelis de Vos with a 2,000 Euro estimate, and a bargain "attributed to Frans Pourbus II" with the same estimate, but this blog post is long enough as it is already.

UPDATE: one I didn't list was a flower piece by Balthasar van der Ast. Estimated, if I recall coorectly, at about 15,000 Euro, it fetched 165,000 Euro instead! It didn't strike me as that exceptional, but it indicates how filled with goodies this auction was. The 2,000 Euro De Vos sold for 10,000 Euro, so that one at least I got right. And the Pourbus went for 24,000 Euro against a 2,000 Euro estimate.