Going private

One of the greatest Renaissance paintings remaining in private hands, Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Darmstadt Madonna’, was sold discreetly this summer. It was not offered at auction but sold by private treaty sale — auction-speak for a negotiated private sale rather than a public auction — in a deal brokered by the art consultant and former head of Sotheby’s Germany, Dr Christoph Graf Douglas. This seminal panel painting, begun in 1526, was commissioned by Jakob Meyer zum Hasen, Mayor of Basel, who is portrayed alongside his family praying at the feet of the Virgin and sheltered by her cloak. It is the artist’s first major altarpiece to represent a new and Italianate form of ideal beauty. Unsurprisingly, it was on the list of works of art that are not allowed to leave Germany.

Negotiating a private treaty sale was the only viable option in this case, given how few institutions or collectors in the country might have been able or willing to pay the heirs of the House of Hesse their asking price of more than €50 million — a fraction of the painting’s value on the open market — and how long it might take them to raise it. (When the Städel Museum in Frankfurt’s final offer of €40 million was rejected, the White Knight, once again, was the industrialist and contemporary art collector Reinhold Würth, who had similarly acquired the Fürstenberg collection of Old Master paintings as a philanthropic gesture in 2003 and placed them on public display in the medieval Johanniterhalle in Schwäbisch Hall. The altarpiece will join this collection when the building’s security has been enhanced.)

What is perhaps even more interesting is the phenomenal rise in the number of discretionary private treaty sales that are organised not by agents or dealers but by the auction houses.