(New York) A portrait of the Spanish Queen Isabella de Bourbon, painted in the 17th century by the Spanish master Diego Velazquez, will be sold at auction in New York in February, announced Sotheby’s, which estimates the work at 35 millions of dollars.
In a press release on Thursday, the large New York auction company of Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi announced that this two-meter-high canvas, featuring the daughter of the French King Henry IV, would be exhibited to the public in London from December 1 to 6 before being offered at auction in the American megacity on February 1, 2024.
“This exceptional painting is remarkable not only for its beauty and quality, but also for its size and its subject, royal portraits,” enthused George Wachter, responsible at Sotheby’s for paintings by the great European masters of the Renaissance.
“No other Velazquez painting of this size and importance has been on the market for over half a century,” he said.
Sotheby’s estimates that this portrait of Isabella de Bourbon, Queen of Spain could sell for “around $35 million,” a price “among the highest for old master paintings on the auction market.”
Painted in the 1620s-1630s, during a period of “transformation in the career of Diego Velazquez” (1599-1660), the portrait depicts Isabella de Bourbon – Elizabeth of France before her marriage to the Spanish King Philip IV – around the age of 20, “standing confidently in a dazzling black court dress […] at the height of her power, like a beloved and respected queen.”
She was the daughter of King Henry IV of France and his second wife Marie de Medici.
The work of the Spanish genius of Baroque painting, famous for Las Meninas (1656), was exhibited for decades in a royal palace in Madrid before landing at the Louvre at the beginning of the 19th century, then being sold to dealers and collectors until an auction in 1950 and have been in the hands of their current owners since 1978, according to Sotheby’s.
This house and its competitor Christie’s, part of the Artémis portfolio company of French billionaire François Pinault, concluded their fall auction season in mid-November in New York, with a cumulative amount of two billion dollars in sales.
