New York – Christie’s Old Master & British Drawings sale set an important auction record for a drawing by Sir Anthony van Dyck, as the auction totaled $4,826,080, 135 percent sold hammer above low estimate, and 86 percent sold by lot. The top lot of day was the record-setting sheet, Van Dyck’s Portrait of Willem Hondius, which made $2,107,000. It is one of the most important Northern drawings to have surfaced in recent decades, and adds to the corpus of extant drawings by van Dyck in preparation for his monumental series of engravings of notable people, known as the Iconographie. Christie’s set the previous record for a van Dyck drawing 40 years ago, with the sale of another study for the same series, the Portrait of Hendrick van Balen, which Christie’s sold in London on behalf of the Duke of Devonshire during the legendary Old Master Drawings of Chatsworth auction, 3 July, 1984. That sheet fetched £585,000 and was bought by J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California.  

International Head of Old Master Drawings Department, Stijn Alsteens said: “Today’s sale of van Dyck’s Portrait of Hondius continues Christie’s good fortune with this artist, and shows once again that exceptional work can do better than ever. As a whole, the number of participants at the auction, the sell-through rate achieved, and the prices obtained confirm that drawings of all schools and at all price levels attract strong interest from private collections, public institutions and the trade.”

The top lots in the sale reflect the strength in the market for a wide variety of different styles, eras, and media in works on paper. Francesco Salviati's two-sided sheet of figure studies, a powerful testament to Florentine Mannerism, brought $529,200; a 16th century drawing from the Netherlands of Breugel’s famous Painter and the Connoisseur, made $108,000; a 17th century miniature by Jacob Hoefnagel, Apelles painting Campaspe, the Mistress of Alexander the Great realized $107,100. Two masters of 18th century France were among the top lots. A vast Roman capriccio by Hubert Robert of a great colonnaded building brought $138,600, and one of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s famed studies for illustrations of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Ruggiero desperately seeking Angelica made $100,800. English drawings were well represented in the sale, including Joseph Mallord William Turner’s watercolour, Plymouth Citadel, a gale, which realized $151,200.