Day-Old Sale Record Broken by Same Artist

The day-old American auction record of $2.93 million for an Old Master painting set Thursday was smashed today by the sale of another painting by the same Dutch artist for $6.6 million.

A 5-by-8-foot still life featuring fruit, flowers and lobsters on a Ming dish, elaborate silver, seashells and a lute by Jan Davidsz de Heem, painted in 1642 for King Charles I for Windsor Castle, was sold for a record price to a telephone bidder at an auction of 159 Old Masters at Christie’s gallery. The purchaser was identified only as “a private collector.”

The sale brought a total of $11.3 million, a record for a one-session American auction of Old Master works.

One of High Points

De Heem’s elaborate banquet painting is considered his masterpiece and one of the high points of Northern Baroque art. It was consigned to sale by an anonymous family, thought to be a Swedish family into whose collection the painting passed when it was last auctioned in Amsterdam in 1912. It had belonged to the British Royal Family until 1800.

The previous, day-old record for an Old Master was set at Sotheby’s galleries with the purchase of an elaborate 1649 De Heem still life featuring fruit, shellfish and silver by Thomas B. Brod, a London dealer.

The De Heem sales catapulted the artist, little known in America, to the front rank of 16th- and 17th-Century Lowland painters, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ter Borch, De Hooch, Rubens and Hals. The artist’s early monochrome style became vigorous and colorful after he moved from Leiden to Antwerp in 1635 and became acquainted with the exuberant Flemish school of painting.