Sotheby’s will sell a group of works from the collection of Old Masters dealer Richard L. Feigen this fall. The single owner sale will include more than 50 paintings and works on paper dating back to the 14th to 20th century. The sale will be in New York on October 18, during the auction house’s Masters Week, when Sotheby’s stages its most highly anticipated Old Masters auctions. The grouping is expected to fetch a collected $11.5 million–$17 million.
Feigen, who died at the age of 90 in January after contracting Covid-19, first opened his famed gallery in Chicago in 1957 and later expanded to New York, London, and Los Angeles. Eventually, he went on to accrue a formidable roster of high-profile clients, among them collectors like Saul Steinberg and Leon Black and museums like the Louvre.
Highlights from the collection include Richard Parkes Bonington’s painting of the Grand Canal in Venice, The Palazzo Manolesso (ca. 19th century), which is expected to fetch $2 million–$3 million. Annibale Carracci’s biblical scene The Return From The Flight Into Egypt (ca. 17th century) is estimated at $400,000–$600,000.
The sale will also include works by Italian artists Domencio Beccafumi, Lorenzo Monaco, Allegretto Nuzi, and Spinello Aretino. Beccafumi will be represented in the sale by an arched canvas from the 14th century depicting the Madonna and Saint Joseph with Jesus as an infant. It is estimated at $300,00–$500,000.
Alongside Old Masters, Feigen also specialized in selling works by Max Beckmann. The German Expressionist’s Portrait of a Turk (1926), a dimly lit portrait of a bearded man holding a cigarette and facing the viewer head-on, is headed to auction at Sotheby’s. It is expected to fetch a price of $2 million–$3 million. Another of Beckmann’s paintings, a Bavarian seascape painted in 1934, is expected to sell for $1.8 million–$2.5 million.
“Feigen was an advocate for masters of any period,” Christopher Apostle, Sotheby’s head of old master paintings in New York, said in a statement, adding that the dealer possessed “an innate ability to identify the quality of and importance of artists that other overlooked.”
Feigen, who once described himself as “a collector in dealer’s clothes,” was known for acquiring works that would become highly valuable on the market. In 2009, he sold J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius Restored at Sotheby’s which brought in $12.9 million. In 2016, Feigen sold Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold (ca. 1623), at Sotheby’s, where the Getty Museum in Los Angeles bought it for $30.5 million.
Highlights from Feigen’s collection will go on display in London later this month before coming to New York ahead of their sale in October.
