Head of a Woman by Jacopo Ligozzi
The Old Master and British Drawings sale at Christie’s kicked off the Classic Week of nineteenth-century and Old Master sales being held at the New York auction houses starting on February 4th. This sale was highly anticipated mostly because of a recently rediscovered J.M.W. Turner watercolor that would be crossing the block. However, the top spot was a chalk drawing by a sixteenth-century Italian artist. Head of a Woman by Jacopo Ligozzi was among the handful of highly-valued lots featured at Christie’s on Tuesday, with an estimate range of $200K to $300K. The drawing shows a woman in profile with an elaborate headdress featuring gold chains, ribbons, and an enormous pearl. It last came to auction in 1993 at Phillips, selling for £108K. It is one part of a series of seven drawings Ligozzi created while working at the court of the Medici family in Florence, likely in the 1570s. The head drawing exceeded its estimate, hammering at $400K (or $504K w/p).
The Approach to Venice by J.M.W. Turner
The famous Turner watercolor was expected to be the sale’s top lot but came in just behind the Ligozzi drawing. As I wrote several weeks ago, when the watercolor first made the news, the work was previously in the collection of a British civil servant, who believed it was by the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. It’s been over a century since the painting has been at auction, last selling at Christie’s London in 1920 for 165 guineas (or about £6.6K in 2025). The watercolor was created in the final decade of Turner’s life, on his third and final visit to Venice. This was when he was growing increasingly experimental in his technique. Many have pointed out that his method of landscape painting likely greatly influenced the impressionist generation later in the century. The watercolor is incredibly rare, as the Yale Center for British Art is the only place outside Britain and Ireland where any of Turner’s Venetian watercolors are kept. Therefore, the Christie’s estimate of $300K to $500K seems understandable. Unfortunately, the Venetian watercolor failed to meet expectations, hammering at $260K (or $327.6K w/p). Immediately after was another Turner watercolor. Binger Loch and Mäuseturm is a slightly less abstract work, likely created during his 1817 trip to continental Europe, producing around fifty watercolors. The present work shows the Rhine River and the Mäuseturm shoal near Bingen am Rhein. Turner ended up creating a total of three watercolors based on sketches he made of the area. Estimated to sell for between $200K and $300K, Binger Loch and Mäuseturm sold for slightly underestimate, like the Venetian watercolor. It hammered at $180K (or $226.8K w/p).
Binger Loch and Mäuseturm by J.M.W. Turner
There were a few surprises at Christie’s, with five of the one hundred nineteen available lots selling for more than double their high estimates. However, two were noteworthy because they sold for 4.7 times what was expected. Both are sixteenth-century drawings by Italian artists. The first, a red chalk drawing showing a cherub’s head by Michelangelo Anselmi, sold for $28K (or $35.3K w/p) against a $6K high estimate. The other is a double-sided ink drawing by Domenico Campagnola showing a nude man next to a tree on one side, with two figures fighting each other on the other. It sold for $14K (or $17.6 w/p) against a $3K high estimate. Of the one hundred nineteen available lots, twenty-three sold within their estimates, giving Christie’s specialists a 19% accuracy rate. The largest bulk of the lots sold below estimate, totaling forty-eight (40%) lots. An additional twenty-six lots (22%) sold above their estimates, while the remaining twenty-two (18%) went unsold, giving Christie’s an 82% sell-through rate. The sale brought in a total of $1.68 million (or $2.1 million w/p) against a presale total low estimate of $1.61 million.