Clara Peeters, A presumed self-portrait with a lavish display of objects in a vanitas still life and a still life of flowers in a glass vase (around 1610)
Old Master and 19th Century Paintings Evening Auction, Sotheby’s, London, 2 July
Estimate: £1.2m to £1.8m
While both the attribution and the subject have been the focus of debate for centuries, Sotheby’s posits this painting is a self-portrait by Clara Peeters. A rare successful woman artist in the early 17th century, Peeters is known for hiding miniature glimpses of herself in the reflections of goblets and lids of the still-lifes popular during her lifetime. Sotheby’s presumed self-portrait is one of only two known works featuring figures in Peeters’s catalogue, of which some 40 paintings have survived to the present day. The vanitas still-life has been hidden away in private collections for most of the past several centuries, and last sold for £28,000 when it appeared at auction in 1994. If it sells toward the high end of its estimate, it will surpass Peeters’s record at auction set in 1998, when one of her still-lifes fetched 10.1 million French francs ($1.6m).
Clare Leighton, Portrait of Mahatma Gandhi (1931)
Travel and Exploration, Bonhams, London, 7-15 July
Estimate: £50,000 to £70,000
This painting of Mahatma Gandhi, known as the “Father of the Nation” in India, is believed to be the only one the resistance leader posed for in his lifetime. The British artist Clare Leighton was introduced to Gandhi through her relationship with the left-wing political journalist Henry Noel Brailsford. Thanks to that connection, Leighton had almost unprecedented access to Gandhi during the time of the Second Round Table Conference, when he was living in London’s East End. After her portraits were exhibited in London in 1931, Gandhi’s personal secretary, Mahadev Desai, wrote to Leighton and said: “It was such a pleasure to have had you here for many mornings doing Mr. Gandhi’s portrait …. many of my friends who saw it … said to me that it was a good likeness”. Since then, the portrait has remained in Leighton’s family, who say that the painting was once knifed in a 1974 attack by a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a right-wing Hindu nationalist group.
Max Beckmann, Grosser Steinbruch in Oberbayern (Large Quarry in Upper Bavaria) (1934)
Tales from The Art Crypt: Works from The Richard Feigen Collection, Dreweatts, London, 2 July
Estimate: £500,000 to £700,000
Max Beckmann’s scene of a hard stone quarry encroaching on a Bavarian forest hums with an underlying tension. Far from an unpolitical landscape, the contrast of nature and industrialisation and the storm clouds in the sky reflect the anxieties of 1934 Germany. Adolf Hitler had been appointed chancellor the year before, and Beckmann became a target of the Nazi Party’s suspicions for his “subversive tendencies”. Beckmann lost his teaching job in Frankfurt and moved to Berlin, from where he and his wife Mathilde frequently visited her mother in Ohlstadt, Upper Bavaria. According to Dreweatts, Beckmann only completed 11 canvases during his time in Ohlstadt. In 1937, Beckmann and Mathilde escaped to the Netherlands and then the US, never to live in Germany again. Grosser Steinbruch in Oberbayern comes from the collection of the late Richard Feigen, who was the leading Beckmann dealer in the US before he died in 2021.
Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd
Philip Pearlstein, Two Models with Giraffe and Bird Masks, Chrome Chair and Bookshelves (2016)
First Open, Christie’s, New York, 3-18 July
Estimate: $50,000 to $70,000
Two Models shows two female subjects lounging, one on a chair and the other draped on a sculpture of a giraffe. One wears a mask, and neither looks towards the viewer. The unerotic nudity, the small, homey details like a bookshelf and blankets, and the unengaged models in the painting create an unsettling “intimate yet isolated” atmosphere, according to Christie’s. Philip Pearlstein began his painting career showing Abstract Expressionist work, but in the early 1960s turned towards the stark, Realist nudes he is remembered for today. It marked a shift in his own style, as well as the abstract work most popular among artists working in New York at the time. Pearlstein was called a trailblazer for his influence in the reinvigoration of realistic portraiture in American art. This painting comes from the collection of Joel and Carole Bernstein, whose acquisitions focused primarily on the human figure.
