Sargent Sale

Sargent Sale

A sometime King of Portugal was helped to a quiet corner. Sir Gerald Du Maurier stared from a bench, uttering little cries of admiration. Lord Beatty stood up near the pulpit and facing him, packed along wooden forms like rooks on a wire, were all the famed Art collectors, connoisseurs in England. They had come to Christie’s auction rooms to bid for the odds and ends that John Singer Sargent left around his studio when he died (TIME, Apr. 27). The auctioneer turned suavely to the gentlemen on the forms, nodding at a raised finger that meant 200 guineas, catching a wink that raised the bid by several hundred.

For a while he made about $1,000 a minute from such winks, nods. Then the company settled down to serious bidding. A representative of Governor Fuller of Massachusetts paid $35,000 (the highest price of the day) for a small, irridescent canvas: Vigilio: A Boat With Golden Sails, bought five other pictures for the Governor’s grim home in Maiden. Little paintings that Sargent had done when he was studying —Venetian scenes, casual landscapes, watercolors — brought thousands of pounds; $23,000 for a diminutive canal scene, $11,000 for a picture of the Doge’s palace; $4,300 for Man Seated by a Stream, “undoubtedly the most expensive man,” said the London Evening News, “who ever sat by a stream.”

When, late in the day, Christie’s door clicked behind the last bidder, it was found that the take was $730,000—”a world’s record.”