The works offered by Christie's, which included the Augustus John also reported in this week's Art Market, came from the family of Thomas Gibson, having been acquired by the London dealer between 1975-2006.
He told The Times that they were now owned by his children and the prospect of an increase in capital gains tax in the budget had been among the reasons that it felt like a good time to sell.
As expected, the top lot at the auction on March 1 was a Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) portrait sketch titled La Mousmé that was estimated at $7m-10m and was knocked down at $8.8m (£6.33m) to London dealership Dickinson.
The price was a record for a van Gogh drawing, surpassing the previous high which had stood for over two decades: the £4.8m for Oliviers avec les Alpilles au fond sold at Sotheby’s London back in December 1999.
The work in the current sale depicted a Provençale girl and was executed in Arles in August 1888. A 12½ x 9½in (31 x 24cm) signed sketch, it was part of series of reed pen drawings of finished paintings that the artist sent to Emile Bernard, John Russell, and his brother Theo during his time in southern France. The oil painting version of this portrait today hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The drawing had been looted from the Hirschland family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, but was restituted in 1956. Gibson had acquired it from the Hirschland heirs in 1983 and had since lent it to a number of exhibitions, most recently Tate Britain’s Van Gogh And Britain show in 2019.
