Every December, there is a stark divide in the art market between the contemporary crowd partying in Miami and the festive Old Master sales in London.
The capricious Old Master market has always danced to its own tune, its fortunes dictated by genuinely limited supply. Those fortunes tend to swing between Christie’s and Sotheby’s, with one or other having the better evening sale each season. In June, it was Christie’s, with its record-breaking £31.9m Canaletto painting, but last week Sotheby’s came out stronger.
The top lot of the week (aside from the Fabergé Winter Egg, of which more below) was Saint John on Patmos (c. 1660) by Rembrandt, which sold during Sotheby’s Old Master paintings evening sale for £6.8m (all prices with fees), within an estimate of £5m to £7m, to the London dealer Johnny Van Haeften. He tells me he bought it in partnership with two other dealers, Otto Naumann and Ben Hall, and describes it as a ‘rehabilitated’ rather than ‘reattributed’ Rembrandt. Haeften says, ‘It’s not really newly attributed because it was always called Rembrandt, and then it then was called [Carel] Fabritius for a while. But [the scholars] Abraham Bredius and Wilhelm Valentiner realised it was a late Rembrandt, and so it came back into the fold again. It’s clearly by him and all the experts are 100 per cent behind it.’
After months of work, George Gordon, co-chairman of Old Masters at Sotheby’s, was the one who ‘rehabilitated’ the Rembrandt, saying it had become ‘unmoored from its attribution’ in the early 20th century. Van Haeften concedes that the painting is ‘not in a perfect state’ but finding late Rembrandts today is ‘extremely difficult [since] there are so few left’. Van Haeften works closely with the Leiden Collection, formed by the collector Thomas Kaplan. This painting was not bought on Kaplan’s behalf, though, Van Haeften tells me. ‘He’s already got 17 Rembrandts, he may not want another. But on the other hand, it’s a very good one and it’s a late one.’ The trio who acquired the work have apparently had three approaches from potential buyers already – two collectors and a museum.
Overall, Sotheby’s sale made £30.7m from 31 lots offered (eight failed to sell), the highest total for a Sotheby’s evening sale in London in five years. Even more admired than the Rembrandt was a 15th-century triptych depicting the five miracles of Christ (c. 1480–90) by an unknown Flemish artist, which sold for £5.7m, roughly double the estimate. The triptych had been in St Johns’ Almshouse in Sherborne, Dorset since it was made, but the charity decided to sell the work after having it valued by Sotheby’s. ‘Once it became apparent it was such an important work with that kind of value, it was just too expensive for them to afford to be able to keep,’ says Elisabeth Lobkowicz, a director and specialist in Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department. The buyer at Sotheby’s was a Christian charitable foundation that has said it plans to put it on public view in Sherborne. Interestingly, it was underbid by Ottilie Windsor, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in London, which suggests that her client was more often a buyer of contemporary art.
As Van Haeften says, the Old Master field is a ‘best and the rest’ market: ‘There’s still great demand for really good pictures. The Sherborne triptych was a fabulous thing and a very great rarity. Quite rightly, there was a lot of competition for it.’
The night before, Christie’s evening sale of the same size made £12.7m, not far off the £13.9m achieved in the equivalent sale last year, says Andrew Fletcher, global head of Christie’s Old Master department.
The star at Christie’s was an early work by the Dutch painter Gerrit Dou, a pupil of Rembrandt, titled The Flute Player, painted in c. 1632–35, when Dou was around 20 and had just left Rembrandt’s workshop. Appearing on the market for the first time in 125 years, having been in Elton Hall, near Peterborough, it was estimated at £2m–£3m and sold for £3.8m. Christie’s set the record for Dou in 2023, when A young woman holding a hare with a boy at a window (c. 1653-57) sold for just over $7m in New York.
Dou is not an obvious Old Master to entice new buyers. Yet four of the five bidders who competed for it last week are better known as collectors of modern and contemporary art. ‘The Dou is a more traditional Old Master, but one that is completely perfect, technically brilliant and aesthetically beautiful,’ Fletcher says.
Both Lobkowicz and Fletcher have noticed modern and contemporary collectors displaying interest in the field. ‘A lot of people have suddenly noticed what value is represented by Old Masters,’ Fletcher says. ‘We have seen a massive move into our market by post-war collectors.’ A rising number of bidders across the board (up from an average of 2.8 per lot in 2024 to 3.8 per lot in 2025 at Christie’s) has also boosted the larger, lower-value day sales, which were strong at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s this year.
One of the quietly exceptional works of the week was a print: Rembrandt’s Arnout Tholinx, Inspector (c. 1656), sold for £3.1m at Christie’s on 3 December, a record for any Old Master print. No other edition of this elusive etching and engraving has appeared at auction since this very one was sold at Christie’s 101 years ago. It came from the enormous print collection of Sam Josefowitz (1921–2015), which has been dispersed by Christie’s over the past three years. There have been three Josefowitz auctions dedicated to Rembrandt, and the final one, which took place last week, fetched £8.6m from 101 lots.
But the item that achieved the most widespread attention all week was the Winter Egg, an Imperial egg commissioned from Fabergé in 1913 by Tsar Nicholas II for his mother as an Easter present. The intricate rock crystal and diamond egg sold for £22.9m at Christie’s on 2 December, a record for any Fabergé egg. The buyer was Wartski, the London dealer that also bought this egg around a century ago for £450.
‘It is returning to where it was when it first left Russia, over 100 years ago,’ Kieran McCarthy, the co-managing director of Wartski, tells me. ‘It’s quite an emotional moment for Wartski. It is the most iconic and legendary of all Russian works of art.’ It was also a good time to buy such an egg, McCarthy says, because two major buying forces are currently out of the running – Russia (because of sanctions) and the United States (because of a 35 per cent duty on all Russian items entering the country. ‘There was no worse time to sell this egg, but it’s equally true that there was no better time to buy it,’ McCarthy says. It was sold at Christie’s as part of ‘Princely Collection’ of Fabergé works, which made £27.8m and was sold by the estate of Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani, the highly acquisitive Qatari prince who died in 2014. Al-Thani bought the egg in 2002 for $9.6m at Christie’s New York. Wartski has bought the egg for stock, and McCarthy wonders if one of the new museums in the Gulf might be interested: ‘This is the sort of object which, in a museum, will become a primary attraction that people will travel for.’
Christie’s Classic Week (a capacious label) wrapped up on 10 December with the new Groundbreakers sale, which contained everything from J.R.R. Tolkien’s desk (sold for £330,200) to Spike, a 68 million-year-old Caenagnathid dinosaur skeleton found in 2022, which sold for £3.5m. Dinosaurs are big business – a record was set in July last year when Apex, a Stegosaurus, sold to the American billionaire Ken Griffin for $44.6m at Sotheby’s. That beat the previous high of $31.8m, set in 2020 at Christie’s by Stan the T-rex, a skeleton that – speaking of attractions for which people will travel – now resides in the recently opened Natural History Museum in Abu Dhabi.
That museum opened just before Sotheby’s held its inaugural Collectors’ Week in Abu Dhabi (2–5 December). A world away from the Old Master sales in London, this new venture totalled $133.4m from five auctions of cars, real estate, handbags and jewellery. Perception of value is a curious thing. If money is the measure of value, then a Patek Philippe four-piece watch set, which sold for $11.9m in Abu Dhabi, is apparently worth the same as two immaculately preserved 15th-century triptychs.
Looking to next year, the Old Master sales in New York, traditionally held in late January, will now take place in early February. Christie’s has a newly attributed drawing of a foot by Michelangelo, the first unrecorded study for the Sistine Chapel ceiling to come to auction. The diminutive red chalk drawing, inherited by a man from California who had no idea of its attribution or worth, is estimated to sell for $1.5m–$2m. Meanwhile Sotheby’s has announced a recently restituted 15th-century Hebrew prayerbook, called the Rothschild Vienna Mahzor, which was seized by the Nazis during the Second World War. It is now expected to sell for $5m–$7m on 5 February.