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Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Proserpine Coloured chalks (£1.2-1.8 million). (Click on image to enlarge).  UPDATE: IT SOLD FOR £3,274,500, A WORLD RECORD FOR THE ARTIST.

A defining image of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine, will feature at Sotheby’s sale of British and Irish art in London next November 19.  The artist considered Proserpine the most beautiful of all his inventions. The model for the work, Jane Morris – wife of William Morris – became his inspiration and muse. The present version, formerly in the collection of Glasgow MP 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.

The re-emergence at Sotheby’s of a version in coloured chalks is concurrent with the major Pre-Raphaelites exhibition taking place at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow – the international show first staged by Tate Britain last year and held earlier this year at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

The drawing depicts Proserpine, (Persephone in Greek mythology), daugher of Zeus, in a shadowed corner of her underground palace.  She holds a pomegranate.  The consumption of its seeds condemned her to spend half of each year in the underworld with her abductor Pluto.  The spectator is placed in the position of Pluto, catching Proserpine moments after she has tasted the fruit. Her gaze has become an enigma of feminity. To Rossetti Proserpine, Queen of the Underworld, symbolises love in grief.

Simon Toll of Sotheby’s commented: “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s haunting image of Proserpine is one of the defining images of European art – instantly recognisable and representing the artist at the zenith of his originality. In many ways it stands apart from much of the art created by Rossetti’s contemporaries, as something new and otherworldly that was unlike anything else that had been seen before it. This is one of the most important British pictures to be seen on the auction market in many years, having only been in three collections since it was created in 1880.”

UPDATE: IT MADE £3,274,500, A WORLD RECORD FOR THE ARTIST AT AUCTION.

El Greco, St Dominic in Prayer. (Click on image to enlarge).

El Greco’s St. Dominic in Prayer sold for £9,154,500 at Sotheby’s evening sale of Old Master and British Paintings in London on July 3.  A record for a Spanish Old Master the work had been estimated at £3-5 million.  It was the top lot in a sale which attracted buyers from 33 countries and realised £35,048,000 million. There were two paintingsss by El Greco – the first time in living memory that two masterworks by the artist featured in the same auction.  Christ on the Cross sold for £3,442,500.

Claude-Joseph Vernet’s View of Avignon from the Right Bank of the Rhone sold for a record £5,346,500.

Head of Old Master paintings at Sotheby’s Alex Bell said: “The greatest Old Master paintings have a timeless quality that transcends their era and gives them a relevance to audiences today, as tonight’s global bidding and record result for El Greco attest. The dialogue between Old and New is injecting fresh energy into our field. We’re now firmly in a new era, where clients from new markets are collecting Old Masters in new ways. Our response has been to offer the most exciting and diverse works we can find – and to present them a more contemporary way.” 

(See post on antiquesandartireland.com for June 21, 2013).