Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833-1898)
Love among the Ruins
watercolour on paper, 96.5 x 152.4 cm.
Estimate: £3,000,000 – £5,000,000 ($4,600,000 – $7,500,000)
Sold for £14,845,875 ($22,432,117)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
Proserpine
Estimate: £1,200,000 – £1,800,000
Pre-raphaelite masterpieces under the hammer On July 11th 2013 Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones’s masterful ‘Love among the Ruins’ achieved £14,85 million at Christie’s, while Sotheby’s announced the sale of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s famous ‘Proserpine’.]]>
July 13, 2013, source: Sotheby’s / Christie’s
Love for Burne-Jones at Christie’s
“Love among the Ruins”, a highly important work by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, was the undisputed star at Christie’s Important Victorian & British Impressionist Art auction. With a pre-sale estimate of just £3–5 million, the painting sold for £14,845,875 / $22,432,117 / €17,117,294, setting a new world auction record for the artist, and becoming the most expensive pre-Raphaelite painting ever auctioned. The catalogue described this work as “one of the master’s most perfect and beautiful creations“. Another work by Burne-Jones -“A Gorgon (a fragment)”- also smashed its pre-sale estimate of £20,000 – 30,000, selling for £217,875.
“Sisters”, a beautiful work by Sir John Everett Millais, P.R.A. (1829-1896) sold for £2,301,875 / $3,478,133 / €2,654,062, the second highest price in the auction and a new world auction record for the artist.
Rossetti’s defining “Proserpine” at Sotheby’s
On 19 November 2013, Sotheby’s will offer a defining image of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement and one of the most internationally recognisable images of the nineteenth century. “Proserpine” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) has come to represent the artist in his final and fullest identity, and of all his subjects that of Proserpine occupies a seminal position in the artist’s oeuvre. Rossetti considered Proserpine the most beautiful of all his inventions and the various versions he produced are crucial to our understanding of his art. The present version, formerly in the collection of William Graham, Rossetti’s most loyal and devoted patron, comes to the market for the first time in over forty years, with an estimate of £1.2 – 1.8 million.
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Pre-Raphaelite Art and Design at the National Gallery, Washington (exhibition, 2013)
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