The public sale file for Seventeenth-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, famed for his royal portraits, may greater than double early subsequent 12 months when Sotheby’s provides his portray Isabel de Borbón, Queen of Spain (1632), with an estimate within the area of $35m, in the course of the public sale home’s Outdated Masters gross sales.
The portray reveals Elisabeth of France, Queen of Spain, the French-born queen who was the daughter of Henri IV of France and his spouse, Marie de Médici. (Her mom is the topic of a well-known collection of two-dozen work by Peter Paul Rubens that hangs within the Musée du Louvre in Paris.) At age 13, Elisabeth took the Spanish title Isabel when she married the longer term Philip IV of Spain, a serious patron of European artists together with Velázquez. Within the portrait, Isabel is proven in her twenties.
Sotheby’s says the portrait is a very powerful work by Velázquez to return to the market in additional than 50 years, since his work Juan de Pareja offered for £2.3m in 1970, breaking the file for the most costly portray offered at public sale on the time. (The portray now hangs on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in New York, which this 12 months staged the primary institutional exhibition dedicated to Pareja, who was an artist in his personal proper.) Velázquez’s present public sale file is $16.9m, set in 2007 at Sotheby’s London by his portrait Saint Rufina (1629-32).
The 1623 portray of Isabel hung for years on the Buen Retiro royal palace in Madrid, side-by-side with Velázquez’s famed Philip IV in Black (1623), now positioned on the Museo del Prado. The portrait was taken to France after Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 and displayed within the so-called “Spanish Gallery” on the Louvre throughout King Louis Philippe’s reign. When the type fell from energy in 1838, it was offered throughout a Christie’s sale to Henry Huth, a service provider who displayed it at Wykehurst Place, his mansion in West Sussex. It remained with Huth’s descendents till 1950, and the portray most just lately modified arms in 1978.
The portray is on show at Sotheby’s galleries in London from Friday (1 December) till 6 December, after which in New York forward of Sotheby’s night public sale of Outdated Grasp work on 1 February 2024.
The portray may present a lift for the Outdated Masters market, which constitutes a a lot smaller portion of the general artwork market than it did for many years. European Outdated Masters made up simply 4% of the artwork market’s $67.8bn in gross sales in 2022, based on Artwork Basel and UBS’s most up-to-date Artwork Market Report.
