Old Masters Evening Sale

Presenting a selection of works that trace the evolution of European painting from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the December Old Masters Evening Sale brings together pieces of exceptional quality, defined by rarity, scholarly resonance and notable provenance.

Leading the auction is The Flute Player by Gerrit Dou, an early masterpiece by Rembrandt Van Rijn’s most gifted pupil. Dou’s exquisite technique and limited output made him one of the most coveted painters of the Dutch seventeenth century.

A complete set of Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons—a remarkably rare survival of the artist’s most emblematic invention—reappears on the market. Its intact cycle and dynastic provenance link Habsburg court culture with one of the most storied collecting histories of the seventeenth century.

A powerful modello for Rubens’s Martyrdom of Saint Paul reveals the artist’s creative process at its most urgent and experimental, while Bellotto’s view of The Grand Canal, looking north from the Rialto Bridge, captures Venice with the crystalline precision and atmospheric luminosity that made him the most exacting vedutista of the eighteenth century.

The sale also includes a monumental wooded landscape by Jan Wijnants and Adriaen van de Velde, a rare collaboration uniting two of the seventeenth century’s finest landscape and figure specialists. Also featured is a lyrical early Holy Family by Domenico Beccafumi, whose chromatic radiance and sculptural forms exemplify Sienese Mannerism at its most refined.

The sale includes many other works of exceptional quality and rarity.