SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS
The auction features Sir Peter Paul Rubens’s The Virgin and Christ Child, With Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist (estimate $6/8 million), a newly rediscovered masterwork that has been in private collections since 1946 when it was last sold at auction. The painting was not widely known to scholars and researchers and was not previously recorded in the official Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard. Through research led by Sotheby's Otto Naumann, the painting will now appear in a forthcoming Rubenianum volume, and is believed to be the prime version of the painting. A well-known workshop version, which is part of the Thyssen Collection in Spain and is believed to have been painted circa 1618, has many subtle variations in style that are attributed to the inclusion of Anthony van Dyck in Rubens' workshop. The present painting is believed to be an earlier version, circa 1612, and is a major discovery that establishes the painting's place in Rubens’ officially recognized body of work. Separate release available

The January sale also offers Rubens’s The Last Supper, En Grisaille, an extraordinary sketch appearing at auction for the first time since it was purchased by the present owner more than 35 years ago (estimate $1.5/2 million). Executed mainly in grisaille, the work was made in preparation for an engraving by the printmaker Boëthius A. Bolswert (1580-1633), which reproduced the composition of Rubens’s altarpiece for St. Rombouts Cathedral in Mechelen. Grisaille sketches like this played a role in disseminating and protecting Rubens’s ideas for major compositions, because the wide distribution of ensuing prints would act as a de facto copyright over his designs.

A RARE PORTRAIT BY ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
Ahead of the major monographic exhibition of the work of Artemisia Gentileschi, which opens in April 2020 at the National Gallery in London, Sotheby’s is pleased to offer two paintings by Europe’s most famous female Old Master. Painted circa 1626-37, Portrait of a Gentleman is a rare portrait by the artist, who is often known for her depictions of women in biblical, mythological and historical narratives (estimate $800,000/1.2 million). Dressed in traditional French military garb, the sitter is likely the French military engineer Antoine de Ville, whose likeness is known through an engraving by Jerome David, who Artemisia may have met in Rome through the Accademia dei Desiosi. Since the present work last appeared at auction in 2007, cleaning has revealed that the artist cleverly added her initials AG to the elegant Genoese lace on de Ville’s collar – a detail so subtle, that it went unnoticed for many years.

Sometimes presented by scholars as a proto-feminist, Artemisia reveled in depictions of female heroines such as Judith and Sisera, as well as more traditional subjects such as Cleopatra, Danae, and female personifications of allegories. In Bathsheba at her Bath, the heroine is at her toilet, attended to by two maid-servants (estimate $600/800,000). Painted in the 1640s at the height of her maturity, this impressive, full-scale depiction successfully combines two of Artemisia’s career-long interests: the magnificence of the female form and the voluminous depiction of sumptuous fabrics, particularly in evidence in Bathsheba's yellow drapery.