Sohlberg
Auction rooms need to start paying attention to what works and what does not. Putting together a large sale of ‘nothing too great’ is just not going to cut it today. On July 14th, Sotheby’s presented one of these sales.
von Blaas
As with any sale, there are always a few works that do well. Here, Harald Sohlberg’s Winter Night in the Mountains (a watercolor) took the top spot at £1.1M/$1.5M (£1.35M/$1.86M w/p – est. £800-1.2M). This painting was a very nice example and had descended in the artist’s family – so it was fresh! Another fresh work grabbed the second spot – Eugen von Blaas’ No Love Without Envy. This painting has been in the same family’s collection since 1952; it carried a £150-250K estimate and sold for £350K/$484K (£439K/$606K w/p). And the third-place finisher was Dawson’s The ‘Shun Lee’ in Pacific Seas, which was last on the market in 1962 (oh look, another fresh one that did well), and brought £170K/$235K (£214K/$296K w/p – est. £80-120K). Rounding out the top five were Monsted’s A Woodland Stream on a Summer Day at £120K/$166K (£151K/$209K – est. £60-80K), and Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Head of a Girl at £110K/$152K (£139K/$191K w/p – est. £60-80K).
Dawson
While I could go on about other works that did ok and those that did not (of the top ten lots with the highest estimates, only three sold), I believe that the numbers speak for themselves. The sale consisted of 115 lots. Of those, 60 found buyers, and 55 are going back to their owners, giving them a sell-through rate of just 52%. The total take was £3.05M/$4.2M (£3.8M/$5.25M w/p), while the presale estimate range was £5-7.4M, so even with the buyer’s premium, they fell far short. Of the 60 sold works, 6 were below, 33 within, and 21 above their estimates, this generated an accuracy rate of 28.7% (which is not all that bad), but on the flip side, when almost half the sale is bought-in, that is not very good.
While studying the 33 works that sold within their estimate range, an interesting statistic emerged. Twenty-three of them sold at the bottom of their range, meaning that most likely, those paintings sold on the reserve to just one bidder.
Next up … Christie’s British and European sale…