Record-Breaking Rembrandt Lifts Christie’s Old Master Sales

There are etchings and there are Rembrandt’s etchings. The Dutch Old Master’s portrait of Arnout Tholinx sold for more than $4m with fees at Christie’s in London this week, setting a new record for a print by the artist.

The portrait of Amsterdam’s Inspector of the Medical Colleges came from the remarkable collection built by Sam Josefowitz, a self-made entrepreneur who built a mail-order empire for classical and jazz listeners. He freely admitted he began collecting historic prints “on a whim”.

The Josefowitz single-collection, single-artist sale was one of three mostly Old Master auctions held by Christie’s on December 2-3. Together they scored a B+ on the HENI Auction Index, rebounding from a C last December and its strongest score in the past six years.

The three sales totaled $34m with fees, only half the size of a typical Old Master winter week at Christie's but performed strongly by other metrics. The HENI Auction Index is based on more than ten metrics, not just total sales revenue.

One of the metrics is the percentage of works that sold about their low estimate. They included a portrait by Gerrit Dou, one of Rembrandt’s first and most accomplished pupils. Dou’s The Flute Player (undated) was the star of the show on December 2. Backed by a guarantee, it soared past its estimates, selling for just over $5m with fees.

The share of lots beating their low estimates jumped from 62% last December to 74%, the highest level ever recorded by the HENI Auction Index for these sales.

While led by Old Master works, almost 100 lots in the day sale were by 19th-century artists and a few 20th-century ones, ranging from J.M.W. Turner to Laura Knight.

An undated painting of Amsterdam orphan girls going to church set a new auction record for Nicolaas van der Waay, selling for $276,900 with fees. It was a 250% rise for the Dutch artist who was active from the 1870s until his death in 1936.

The failure of a painting by the Italian female artist Artemisia Gentileschi to find a buyer was among the surprises of the sales.

In July, her painting David with the head of Goliath sold for $2.7m at Sotheby's in London. But this week, Gentileschi's A Woman Presenting her Child to Saint Blaise, which had a $529,700 to $794,500 estimate, was bought-in.

Despite this, the percentage of lots bought-in remained 10 percentage points below average.

Meanwhile, the average hammer to mid-estimate ratio creeped back up to 1.4, the average in past comparable sales.

Two years ago, Christie’s held two sales of works from the Sam Josefowitz collection, which totaled $13.5m with fees and included his Paul Gauguin among other modern works. Part III, Josefowitz's Rembrandt print collection, totaled more than $11m with fees this week.

What started out as a sideline, he was convinced to buy two works when sat next to a persuasive dealer on a plane, became the scholarly collector’s passion.

A pioneer of cross collecting, Josefowitz's wide-ranging interest in visual art mirrored his business career. He co-founded Concert Hall Society with his brother in 1946, a mail-order record business selling classical and jazz LPs directly to subscribers via a “record club”. They then made a success selling books delivered to your door, decades before Jeff Bezos.

Methodology: for how the HENI Auction Index classifies sales, see here