Rembrandt’s Majestic Lion Roars at Sotheby’s

Rembrandt’s drawing of a young lion in captivity led Sotheby’s offerings of Old Master works last week in New York. Selling for $17.86m with fees, the money raised will go towards helping other big cats flourish in the wild.

Billionaire Thomas Kaplan consigned the sketch for the charity he co-founded and so helped Sotheby’s classic winter sales achieve A- on the HENI Auction Index, an improvement on C- a year ago.

Other notable collectors’ holdings also played their part. Historic works acquired by fellow philanthropists Diane “Dee” Nixon and Lester L. Weindling went under the hammer in single-collection sales held between February 4-6.

Sotheby’s seven fine-art sales last week totaled $88m with fees, a significant rebound in revenue. The number of lots traded also saw an increase to levels that are only 20% below comparable sales over the past 20 years on average.

The total might have been $15 million higher had Antonello da Messina’s Ecce Homo, not been acquired by the Italian government in a last-minute coup—reportedly for either the Uffizi or a museum in the artist’s native Sicily. It was withdrawn from the February 5 auction when the deal was sealed.

The HENI Auction Index is based on more than ten metrics, including the percentages of lots hammering above their low and high pre-sale estimates, which both increased and were 5 percentage points above typical.

The average hammer to mid-estimate ratio increased to 1.4, past the usual 1.3 achieved in a typical New York winter week of sales of mainly Old Masters and other historic works.

The star lot from Weindling’s collection proved to be Aert van der Neer’s painting, Frozen River at Sunset (undated). Backed by a guarantee, it sold for $2.37m with fees, 31% above its $1.8m low estimate.

It contributed to an increase in the percentage of lots with “strong” guarantees from February 2025 but the percentage of “weak” guarantees also increased.

Only 15% of lots were bought-in, half the usual percentage. However, the percentage of lots withdrawn was a bit higher than usual: 1.1% versus a typical 0.6%.

Rembrandt’s lion, which will help fund the work of the wild cats conservation charity Panthera, has traveled between the world’s great museums, including the Met, the Getty and Louvre in Paris and Abu Dhabi.

While it may no longer reside in Kaplan’s Leiden Collection, the splendid feline might be spotted in New York again as early as the fall. The chalk sketch is reportedly on the wish-list of the show Rembrandt’s Lions, which is due to open in the Morgan Library in October.

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