A sprinkling of Classic Week highlights: a 10th-century Gospel book, a Turner sketch made as a gift, a Thracian gold mask…

A painted procession of Amsterdam’s orphans

At the turn of the 20th century, Nicolaas van der Waay was one of Amsterdam’s leading artists, and a professor at the city’s prestigious Rijksakademie, says Alastair Plumb, director, senior specialist, European Art. ‘Among his best-known works are his depictions of the Dutch capital’s orphan girls, instantly recognisable by their red and black uniforms.’

The orphan girls were housed in the Burgerweeshuis, which was founded in 1520. Van der Waay wasn’t granted permission to sketch inside the orphanage, but the institution did let him have a uniform, which he used to stage scenes with models in his studio and around the city.

The prayer books in this scene indicate that the girls are on their way to church. Behind them, the glazed panorama of the city gently reflects the outlines of their bonnets. The image evokes civic pride, in both the city and its treatment of the less fortunate, but it says little about the harsh realities of life in the orphanage.

Van der Waay’s ledgers reveal that he completed at least three paintings of this scene. One is in Poland’s National Museum in Poznań, while another is in the Amsterdam Museum, which since 1975 has occupied the former site of the orphanage that didn’t allow Van der Waay within its walls.

A rare 10th-century Gospel book

These recently unearthed Gospels, containing the four books of the New Testament — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — were made more than a millennium ago.

They are written in Carolingian minuscule, a script established by the Emperor Charlemagne, and nail holes indicate that they may originally have been enclosed in a covering of precious metal and jewels, known as a ‘treasure binding’. Inside, one tantalising line of script reads ‘for the veiling of handmaidens of God’, suggesting that the manuscript was produced for women.

A probable candidate for its origin is Essen Abbey, an Ottonian imperial abbey founded in the western region of modern-day Germany around 845 by Altfrid, a Saxon noble who was later canonised. Established as a community for women of nobility, it was presided over by an abbess, who performed the duties of a bishop and was answerable only to the Pope. The canonesses, meanwhile, could carry out a life of prayer and devotion without committing to the poverty or celibacy of nuns, living in their own homes and maintaining courtly staff. The Gospels may have been made for one of Essen's earliest abesses, Wicburg, who ruled from around 896 to 906.

‘Fewer than 10 Latin Gospels from the 10th century or earlier have been offered at auction over the past 100 years, and this is perhaps the first auction of a Gospel book produced by women for women,’ explains Eugenio Donadoni, international specialist for Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. ‘These Gospels are part of an ever-growing body of evidence that shows how active and influential medieval women were in commissioning and creating works of art, disproving the antiquated notion that men were the sole — or principal — agents of cultural activity in the Middle Ages.’

A Thracian gold mask

The inhabitants of ancient Thrace — incorporating modern-day Bulgaria and parts of Greece, Romania and Turkey — were among the most feared peoples in the ancient world. Regarded as powerful warriors, they were employed as mercenaries by their neighbours, the Athenians, to take on mighty Sparta during the Peloponnesian War.

The spoils of combat, combined with the gold-producing lands north of the Aegean and around the Balkans, also made Thracian rulers immensely rich. According to the Athenian historian and general Thucydides, Thrace was ‘of all European monarchies situated between the Ionian Gulf and the Black Sea… the wealthiest in its revenue of silver and prosperity in general’.

‘For the Thracians, gold symbolised power, divinity and a connection between the secular and the sacred,’ explains Ancient Art and Antiquities specialist Rowena Field. ‘They were renowned for their exceptional metalworking skills, producing intricate jewellery, ceremonial vessels and funerary masks.’

Crafted from sheets of thin gold, funerary masks were placed over the faces of deceased Thracian kings, nobles and warriors. This likely example, from around 2,500 years ago, is made of nearly pure gold and is remarkable for its three-dimensionality, with an elongated face, protruding chin, curved cheeks and full lips. A strap runs across the forehead, containing thin strips of gold that mimic a curled fringe. Running vertically past each ear are strings of rosettes decorated in repoussé. It isn’t clear why, but the eyes were left uncovered.

An Old Master painting on alabaster

Sometime around 1530, Sebastiano del Piombo, a Venetian artist working in Rome, decided to attempt painting in oils, not on canvas, but on a slab of marble. By the end of the century, it had become something of a trend, with artists painting complex scenes onto pieces of slate, alabaster, lapis lazuli, jasper, onyx and agate, often using the stones’ natural colours and striations in their compositions. Researching the 2022 exhibition Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530-1800, the Saint Louis Art Museum curator Judith W. Mann documented around 1,400 examples of works in the medium.

Painted on a slab of mottled alabaster, this work depicts the young shepherd David striding away from the decapitated torso of the giant Philistine warrior Goliath, carrying the corpse’s head by its hair.

‘It’s one of four matching panels in the sale, which together could have originally formed part of the decorative scheme of a chapel,’ explains Lucy Speelman, head of the Old Masters to Modern Day Sale. ‘The stone is possibly alabastro di Busca from Cuneo in Piedmont. This rare material was used for the tomb of Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy, in the Basilica of Superga overlooking Turin.’

A drawing of Cowes Harbour gifted by J.M.W. Turner

In the summer of 1827, J.M.W. Turner was invited to visit the recently built East Cowes Castle, a Neo-Gothic house on the Isle of Wight belonging to the architect John Nash. His trip coincided with the local regatta, which had been established the previous year by the Royal Yacht Club. Enthralled by the spectacle, he made this lively view of the bustling harbour, and its partner sketch of the races.

The drawing was a gift for a fellow guest, Harriet Petrie (with whose family the work has remained until now). ‘People tend to think of Turner as a recluse, but this work evokes a much more personable image of the artist,’ says Annabel Kishor, head of British Drawings and Watercolours in London.

‘Turner made well over 30,000 sketches in his lifetime, but the vast majority were left to the public in his will and are now housed at Tate Britain,’ adds the specialist. ‘There are so few in private hands.’

The following year, Turner finished a picture of the same event in oils for Nash, which is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum. The critic John Ruskin called it ‘one of the highest pieces of intellectual art existing’.

A book of extraordinary bird engravings

Daniel Giraud Elliot’s A Monograph of the Phasianidae or Family of the Pheasants is ‘a monument of ornithology’, says Books and Manuscripts specialist Mark Wiltshire. Issued in New York in six parts between 1870 and 1872, it contains 79 lithographic plates that document the variety within this bird family, which the author describes as ‘containing within it the species that afford food for thousands of mankind, and also those which are the original source of all the domestic poultry met with throughout the civilised world’.

The majority of the prints were engraved by Joseph Wolf, a celebrated German artist who worked for the British Museum in London and was the illustrator of choice for explorers such as David Livingstone and Alfred Russel Wallace. Edwin Landseer once described him as ‘without exception, the best all-round animal artist who ever lived’.

Each of Wolf’s prints was coloured by hand, and, as a final flourish, many birds’ breasts and throats were heightened with gum Arabic, adding an iridescence to their feathers. The finished volume, according to the ornithologist R.M. Mengel, is so splendid that ‘of the great 19th-century ornithological monographs, none save Audubon’s is so sumptuous’.

Recent evidence has suggested that Wolf’s lithograph stones were destroyed after around 150 impressions were taken from each one. ‘As a result, this first edition of Elliot’s Family of the Pheasants is incredibly sought-after by collectors,’ says Wiltshire.

A 2nd-century ‘wet-draped’ marble

Around 2,500 years ago, a new style emerged among the sculptors of ancient Greece. Described by the pioneering archaeologist Johann Winckelmann as ‘taken from thin and wet garments, which of course clasped the body, and discovered the shape’, it is now known as ‘wet drapery’.

‘The technique employs highly stylised folds of fabric that cling to the body and flutter behind it to accentuate undulating muscles or curves, and give an impression of forward movement against a breeze,’ says Rowena Field.

Phidias used the technique between 438 and 432 B.C. to give his sculpted women the appearence of facing Athens’s cool breeze high up in the pediments of the Parthenon. Another well-known example is the monumental Winged Victory of Samothrace, which now presides over the Louvre’s main staircase.

Like those works, this marble torso is a rare surviving example of Greek wet drapery — later Roman copies are much more common. The subject’s fabric clings to her torso in beautiful swirls, with a remarkable tension that reveals more than it conceals. ‘The weighty stone has been transformed into delicate ripples, and the result is equally masterful and erotic,’ adds Field.

‘It’s difficult to say which goddess it represents. It could be the goddess of victory, Nike, or it might be Aphrodite, because it resembles a Roman copy of a Greek original of the goddess of love that is now in Rome’s Galleria Borghese. But perhaps the closest parallels can be found in statues of the nymph Aura, a personification of the breeze, often shown with her garments fluttering around her.’

A winter scene by a Norwegian Impressionist

Frits Thaulow might not be a household name, but he moved in important circles.

Born in Oslo in 1847, he studied at Copenhagen’s Academy of Art before becoming one of the earliest members of the Skagen painters — a bohemian group that gathered each summer at Denmark’s northernmost tip to exchange ideas and paint en plein air.

In 1892, Thaulow moved to France. Quickly realising that the countryside suited his disposition better than Paris, he hopped between Brittany, Normandy and the Dordogne, befriending Charles Conder, Auguste Rodin and Paul Gauguin (who even became his brother-in-law).

One of Thaulow’s closest companions, however, was Claude Monet. Thaulow urged the Frenchman to visit Norway. Monet agreed, and spent two months there in the winter of 1895, but found the climate uncomfortable to paint in — a stark contrast to Thaulow, who was once photographed working at his easel ankle-deep in snow, without gloves.

‘The treatment of the landscape and light — and in particular the rippling reflections on the moving water — in La Chapelle de Lillebonne, neige highlights how attuned Thaulow was to the currents of Impressionism,’ says Alastair Plumb. ‘His depictions of rivers are among his greatest works. Another fine example is now housed in the Met Museum.’

Antiquities and the Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture are viewing until 2 December 2025 at Christie’s in London. Valuable Books, Manuscripts and Photographs, including Highlights from The Royal Society of Medicine is on view 6-9 December

Explore Christie’s Classic Week auctions