When German industrialist Reinhold Würth purchased Hans Holbein the Younger's "The Madonna with the Family of Mayor Meyer" last week for an undisclosed sum known to be over €50 million ($70.3 million), it was a loss for Frankfurt's Städel Museum.
The latter institution had also been lusting after the prize work — dubbed by some to be the greatest German Renaissance Madonna — but the highest amount it could muster was a significant, but ultimately unsatisfactory, €40 million ($57 million) in cash.
Although it is commonplace for museums to lose out on contemporary works, the phenomenon has not been as prevalent with Old Masters. The factors behind this favorable situation are various: Museums can often argue for the acquisition of key Old Master works that complement their holdings, the Old Master collecting community is small, and works by big-name artists rarely come on the market. (Of course, museums are notoriously tight-lipped about their negotiations, making it hard to judge how many works have slipped through their grasp.) Still, increasingly large public-minded institutions are having to wage major campaigns to compete for masterpieces.
According to Deutsche Welle, Würth's purchase of the Madonna is the highest price ever paid for a work of art in Germany. Christoph Graf Douglas, the Frankfurt dealer who negotiated the sale, told Bloomberg that he would have been able to get over €100 million on the international market if the work had not been required by law to remain in Germany. The Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles was prepared to spend over $100 million to acquire the Madonna, but the Getty denied being involved in negotiations. "It's a very important painting which any institution would be interested in, but because of the export restrictions we never pursued it," a Getty representative told ARTINFO.
As part of the negotiation, Würth said that he intended to keep the painting on public view, and preference will be given to the Städel Museum and the Landesmuseum in Darmstadt when it is loaned out. The work has been on display at the Städel Museum since 2003, where it will remain until July 24. It will then be transferred to Würth's private museum which is open to the public.
How can museums pursue seminal works in the face of the massive wealth of private individuals? One lesson: they'll have to have the public on their side. Two institutions, one French and one British, managed to hang onto storied works that could have passed into private hands by raising sizable, though much less substantial, sums. The Louvre raised €1 million from the public online to purchase Lucas Cranach the Elder's "Three Graces" for €4 million ($5.3 million) at the end of 2010, while Pieter Brueghel the Younger's "Procession to Calvary" is once again on view at the Nostell Priory after non-profit grants, individual donations, and government support raised the £2.7 million ($4.2 million) purchase price. The latter work had hung in the National Trust site for centuries, but remained in private hands until the museum's purchase in January of this year.
In an even more high stakes case, the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery of London were able to raise a much greater sum to purchase two Titian paintings from the Duke of Sutherland, when he threatened to sell them off on the private market. "Diana and Actaeon" was purchased for £50 million in 2009, and the museum has committed to buy its companion piece, "Diana and Callisto," for the same price by 2012. The acquisition was for the most part publicly financed, with £7.4 million contributed by the private sector. After the purchase of the first painting, the two institutions said in a statement that they were "grateful to the Duke of Sutherland for offering the painting at much below its market value and for giving us several years in which to make payments." When the deal was in negotiation, the Guardian estimated the two paintings' value at £300 million — meaning that the Duke let them go for a third of their market price.
Before the sale of Holbein's Madonna, the most expensive known Old Master painting sale was the "Massacre of the Innocents," which was auctioned at Sotheby's London for £49.5 million ($69.7 million) in 2002. The buyer, Canadian businessman David Thomson, donated the work to Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. Although some contested the painting's new attribution to Rubens — it was previously thought to be by the artist's minor follower Jan van den Hoecke — it nevertheless fetched a staggering price.
The next big question on the Old Master market will surely concern the fate of another recently-attributed work: Leonardo da Vinci's "Salvator Mundi." While it has been designated as off the market — permitting its exhibition at London's National Gallery in accordance with the museum's regulations — the figure of $200 million has been bandied about as a possible price. While that is most likely beyond the range of the possible, ARTINFO expects the painting will suddenly acquire a "for sale" sign in 2012, so stay tuned.
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