Luca Carlevarijs’s “View of the Molo, Venice, Looking West” is one of the highlights of Christie’s first major auction of 2011
OLD MASTER & 19th CENTURY PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS & WATERCOLORS
Christie’s
20 Rockefeller Plaza
Free viewing: January 22-26, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm (Sunday 1:00 – 5:00)
Auction: Wednesday, January 26, 10:00 am, 2:00 & 4:30 pm
212-636-2126
www.christies.com
It’s European Masters Week in New York, and the centerpiece is a major two-part auction at Christie’s on January 26, with more than three hundred works dating from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries on the block. The museum-quality exhibition, free and open to the public, goes on view today, featuring a number of extremely exciting paintings, from private collections, that were initially acquired during the Grand Tour in Italy during the eighteenth century. Highlights include Luca Carlevarijs’s lush, dramatic “View of the Molo, Venice, Looking West” ($3.5-$4.5 million), Giovanni Antonio Canal’s (il Canaletto) “View of Mestre” ($2.5-$3.5 million), Jean-François Millet’s “La fin de la journée; effet du soir” (“L’Homme à la veste”) ($800,000-$1.2 million), William Adolphe Bouguereau’s “Portrait of Eva and Frances Johnston” ($800,000-$1.2 million), Jean-Leon Gérôme’s “Master of the hounds” ($700,000-$1 million), and Giovanni Paolo Panini’s “An architectural capriccio with figures among Roman ruins” ($600,000-$800,000). The auction also includes more affordable paintings, drawings, and studies by Fragonard, Boucher, Lhermitte, Corot, Tiepolo, Gericault, and Rubens, ranging from $5,000 to $150,000 (for the latter’s exquisite “An écorché study of a male nude, with a subsidiary study of the right leg”). European Masters Week continues all over the city, with such exhibitions as “Master Paintings” at Jack Kilgore & Co., “From Gallery Canesso, Paris — The Master of the Blue Jeans and a Selection of Paintings” at Didier Aaron, “Past Reflections, Old Master Paintings from the 17th and 19th Century” at Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, and more Master Drawings shows at Shepherd and Derom Galleries, French and Company, Robert Simon Fine Art, and other locations.