But if Sotheby's Amsterdam (20/12% buyer's premium) are thought to have too modest a turnover to justify their hefty overhead base, perhaps the accountants should take note of what happened there on May 8 when a record €6.1m (£4.35m) was achieved at their 109-lot Old Master Paintings sale. Just under 80 per cent of the lots were sold and the final total nearly doubled the €2.3m-3.3m estimate.
The day was dominated by yet another significant price for the Netherlandish Old Master market's current flavour of the month, Jan Lievens (1607-1674).
The Card Players was a dramatic Caravaggiesque genre piece painted by this precociously talented Leiden artist in c.1624-5, when he was still in his teens, just before he began working with Rembrandt.
The unlined 3ft 2in x 3ft 6in (98cm x 1.06m) canvas had been owned by the Belgian collector Ovide Ghislain, whose house was looted (and he himself shot dead) by the occupying Germans in 1944. The painting, however, survived in situ in the house, where it remained covered in grime and unrecognised until Mr Ghislain's grandson, who collects Contemporary art, recently tried to find out more about this mysterious picture hanging high on one of his walls. It had traditionally been attributed to the Utrecht painter Gerrit van Honthurst.
Sotheby's Old Master paintings specialist Jan Six visited the house, climbed a ladder and, after wiping some spit on the surface of the canvas, discovered Lievens' initials in the upper left corner. Within minutes the painting was consigned for sale. The attribution to Lievens was subsequently formally confirmed by Professor Bernhard Schanckenburg, who provided Sotheby's with a lengthy catalogue note.
Lievens' so-called 'character' heads have recently been making significant seven-figure sums at auction - and at TEFAF Maastricht. But the re-emergence of a major, albeit youthful genre painting by the artist was a significant new development. Given the current vogue for Lievens, the pre-sale estimate of €150,000-200,000 always looked modest.
At least two museums were involved in the bidding, but in the end the competition settled down to a duel in the room between the London dealer Johnny Van Haeften and two determined private collectors. Van Haeften finally prevailed at €1.55m (£1.1m), a record for any work of art sold at an auction in the Netherlands. It is not, however, an auction record for the artist, which remains the £1.65m paid by Van Haeften for Lievens' Study of a Bearded Man at Sotheby's Bond Street in 2004.
Johnny Van Haeften told ATG: "This is a really good thing. People think that in his early years Lievens was as good as Rembrandt. There's a lot of charm to this image, but at the same time there's real intensity in the expressions."
Van Haeften's determined bidding was underpinned by the knowledge that since the March TEFAF Maastricht fair he has sold no fewer than 47 paintings, equivalent to a quarter of his total stock. "It's been a stellar year. Everybody seems to have been doing good business and buyers of Modern art are now looking at older pictures."
Exchange rate: £1 = €1.40
By Scott Reyburn
