An oil painting by Flanders-born painter Roeland Savery (1576-1639) was hammered down at €810,000 (£724,152) after bidding started at €15,000 at auction house Walter Ginhart.
Paradise, painted in 1625, was one of the artist’s many landscapes depicting animals, both fanciful and real, here shown in the peaceable kingdom of paradise.
The sale is not a record for Savery but it is a high price for an item sold online, via sales platform lot-tissimo, from a relative small auction house in Germany.
Record online sale
Jörg Wisniewski, partner at German online auction specialist lot-tissimo, said: "This sale represents a record for us for an online sale."
The consignor, a private local owner, had originally contacted larger auction houses in Germany but due to busy sale calendars no one was available to visit and value the painting. She decided to contact her local auction house, Ginhart, who offered the picture with a starting price of only €15,000 and an unpublished reserve price of €3500. No information on the buyer has been disclosed.
According to Blouin Art Sales Index the most recent sale of Savery’s work at auction was in July at Sotheby’s in London, when it sold Orpheaus Playing the Lyre to the Animals (1618) at $484,088 (£362,872) including premium. The current auction record for a Savery was set in March 2012 at Koller Auktionen in Zurich, at $5.2m (£3.9m) for the Still life of flowers in a glass vase with lizard and butterfly (1612).
