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In London’s Classics Week Sales, Old Masters Were Back, But Only the Best of the Best

Results confirmed a resilient but unforgiving market, where provenance, rediscovery and rarity mattered much more than famous names.

Following London’s contemporary sales, the major auction houses turned to the timeless beauty of the classics, with Christie's and Sotheby's staging their Old Masters sales in close succession. The category has seen a significant rebound in recent years. Christie’s year-end results reported $182 million in Old Masters sales in 2025, up 24 percent year-on-year, while its broader Classics category rose 15 percent, making it the department with the strongest year-on-year growth across the house. Earlier this year, Sotheby’s first Old Masters Week at the Breuer in February brought $94.8 million, above its $93.1 million presale high estimate. Together, the two houses moved more than $200 million of Old Masters material that week.

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Yet the London session showed what a buyer’s market can mean for the Old Masters market: a focus on quality, with solid demand for historically validated names, exceptional condition and provenance, fresh-to-market works and rediscoveries. Buyers, in other words, remained extremely selective. In many cases, a big name was not enough to inspire bidding wars. Every lot had to be the right picture, with the right combination of those conditions.

The session began at Christie’s on Tuesday, June 30, with the Old Masters Evening Sale and The Exceptional Sale: Masterworks Across Cultures, which generated a combined total of £50,717,740 ($66,947,417), with a solid overall sell-through rate of 96 percent by value and 90 percent by lot.

The evening sale, meanwhile, brought £38.9 million ($51.4 million), surpassing its £25-37.5 million presale estimate and closing with only three bought-in lots—a panel of The Resurrection of Christ by the Master of the Oberstenfeld Altarpiece, Thomas Gainsborough’s Portrait of Dorothea, Lady Eden and Canaletto’s Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore from the Bacino di San Marco—and one withdrawn lot (Michiel van Musscher’s A Portrait of the Artist in His Studio). Beyond that, the sale proceeded with a measured rhythm of moderate bidding activity across its 40 lots, becoming more spirited around the evening’s highlights and some exceptional rediscoveries.

Leading was Sir Thomas Lawrence’s celebrated portrait of the Duke of Wellington, Britain’s greatest military hero, which sold for £9,670,000, falling comfortably within its £8-12 million estimate and establishing a new world auction record for the artist. Painted in 1820, five years after the Duke’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, and in the same year Lawrence became president of the Royal Academy, the work was described by Christie’s as an extraordinary piece that helped cement the artist’s reputation. The painting last sold at auction, also at Christie’s, in November 2006 for £1.9 million, where it was acquired by the current consignor. It was later exhibited in the 2011 Lawrence survey Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power & Brilliance, which traveled between the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.

The Old Masters Evening Sale also set seven artist records. Among the star lots were two vanitas still-life paintings by the 18th-century Dutch master Jan van Huysum, each rendering with vibrant color and meticulous precision its lush composition of fruit and flowers, and each breaking the previous record for the artist. Fruit and Flowers in a Wicker Basket fetched £6,516,000, followed by Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, which sold for £5,540,000. Both carried third-party guarantees and had last been seen at auction more than a decade ago: the first was bought by the current consignor at Sotheby’s London in December 2003 for £4.4 million, while the second sold in the same sale for £2.7 million.

Other record-breaking lots included Jan van Mieris’ elegant allegory of painting, The Art of Painting (Pictura), new to auction, which achieved £355,600 against its £200,000-300,000 estimate. A new high was also reached by an epic Constantinople court scene, Mehmed II and the Patriarch Gennadius Outside the Walls of Constantinople, by Girolamo da Santa Croce, a 16th-century Bergamo-born Renaissance artist and pupil of Giovanni Bellini. Interestingly, when it was cataloged in 1852, it was attributed to Bellini himself. Fresh to........

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