Rothschild Sale Breaks European Auction Records - Austrian Rothschild family art auction brings in $90 million - Brief Article

Art in America, Sept, 1999 by David Ebony

Numerous auction records were shattered when property from the Austrian branch of the Rothschild banking family was put on the block this summer. Amid some controversy, the series of sales was conducted July 4-8 at Christie's in Vienna.

The items on offer, mostly old-master paintings and antiques, had been in the collection of brothers Albert and Nathaniel von Rothschild, whose palatial residences in southwest Austria, and the art and antiques that filled them, were confiscated and carefully catalogued by the Nazis in 1938. During the course of World War II, numerous objects were lost, and, at the conflict's end, many of the remaining Rothschild valuables were declared government property and put on public display in various Viennese museums. Family members who survived the war in exile and tried to recover property in Austria were allowed to take out of the country only a small portion of their belongings and were pressured to "donate" the remaining items to the state.

Beginning in 1996, however, the Austrian government began to reverse its position, and last year it agreed to allow Rothschild works to be returned to the family [see p. 29]. Led by Baroness Bettina Rothschild Looram, matriarch of the Austrian clan, the family decided to sell the objects and divide the proceeds. Despite protests by some Austrians who wanted the works to remain in the country, the auction went ahead.

The results of the July sale far exceeded expectations. The auction realized $90 million, more than double the presale estimate of $40 million, and the highest total for a single-owner auction in Europe. All 222 lots offered found buyers. Purchase prices include the auction house commission of 15 percent on the first $50,000, and 10 percent on the remainder.

Top lot was a medieval illuminated manuscript from Flanders, The Rothschild Prayerbook (ca. 1505), which sold for $13.3 million. The price, far above its $4.9-million high estimate, is the largest sum ever paid at auction for an illuminated manuscript. Second was Frans Hals's Portrait of Tieleman Roosterman (1634), which sold to an unidentified phone bidder for $12.8 million (est. $4.1-$5.7 million), an auction record for the artist. A 1778 Louis XVI commode by Jean-Henri Riesener soared above its $4.1-million high estimate to sell for $10.9 million, the highest auction price ever for a piece of French furniture. It was purchased for the palace of Versailles--its original home--with funds provided by the French government, the Versailles Foundation and a donation by Mrs. Francois Pinault, wife of the owner of Christie's.

Among other highlights of the sale was a 16th-century Persian medallion carpet, which garnered $2.4 million, far exceeding its $410,000 high estimate, and a world auction record for a carpet. A 1653 canvas by David Teniers II, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and the Artist in the Archducal Picture Gallery in Brussels, brought $4.6 million, more than three times the high estimate and an auction record for the artist. A tall Louis XVI ormolumounted clock, made in 1774, sold for $3 million (est. $820,000-$1.3 million), the all-time auction record for a clock.