For their Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture auction, Sotheby’s reached the high end of its presale estimate. Held this past Thursday, the sale expected to rake in between $38 million and $55 million. The final result was $53.4 million. The highest seller was the “Jupiter and Antiope,” a 1612 mythological scene by Hendrick Goltzius, which picked up $6.7 million. The previous sale for this artist had been at $1.5 million in 1996 when the art market was recovering.
Rembrandt’s “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Black Hat” was also estimated to gain anywhere from $8 million to $12 million, but the painting never reached these numbers, and was therefore withdrawn by the seller who had picked up the piece of $9 million in 2007.
