London – Property of the Heirs of Daniël George Van Beuningen (1877-1955) will be offered across Christie’s Old Masters Evening Sale (seven works) and Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawing, Sculpture (four works) on 1 and 2 July, during Classic Week London. The paintings are being sold be descendants of the coal magnate and business tycoon, Daniël George van Beuningen, who is perhaps best known today for assembling one of the most significant private collections of Old Masters in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Spanning seventeenth century Dutch pictures, early Netherlandish, Flemish, Italian, German and Spanish pictures, the 11 works being auctioned are led by Gerard Dou’s beautiful A cottage interior with an old woman (estimate: £1,000,000-1,500,000). Estimates range from £6,000 to £1,500,000, with the group as a whole expected to realise in the region of £5million. The works will be on public view in London in the pre-sale exhibition from 26 June to 1 July.

A cottage interior with an old woman ('Rembrandt's Mother') delousing a boy's hair exemplifies the seductively refined pictorial language and remarkable technique that made Gerrit Dou, like his master Rembrandt, one of the most successful Dutch artists of the seventeenth century. Celebrated for his painstakingly executed works, he enjoyed the favour of artists and connoisseurs alike, within his lifetime and in the centuries that followed.

The importance of the group is further emphasised by notable works by Lucas Cranach the Younger , El Greco and Studio, Adriaen Jansz van Ostade, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and Bernardo Bellotto, among others, a selection are detailed and depicted below.

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Daniël George Van Beuningen (1877-1955)

The son of the co-founder of Steenkolen Handels Vereeniging, van Beuningen oversaw the growth of the business into a vast conglomerate after the First World War. His focus was always on Rotterdam, bringing about an economic transformation of the city that saw the port grow into one of the largest in the world at the time. His legacy lives on in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, which he supported throughout his lifetime and which adopted his name from 1958 after his collection was acquired by the Rotterdam Municipal Government. The pictures in this sale once formed an integral part of Van Beuningen’s collection.

Van Beuningen was a passionate collector with huge spending power. He had what Max J. Friedländer described as: ‘not only financial resources, but to afar greater extent enthusiasm and understanding’, with which to compete for some of the best pictures and collections to come to the market. This legacy includes how he took advantage of the times to make many of the acquisitions for his collection. Three of the works in this group, for example, came from the collection of the Austrian banker Stefan von Auspitz whose entire collection was bought en bloc in 1931. The business (SHV) continued to prosper during World War II and Van Beuningen carried on collecting, pulling off perhaps his most famous coup with the acquisition of Jan van Eyck’s Three Marys from the Cook Collection in England in 1940 for £250,000, a price considered to be outrageously high in Holland at the time. In the same period he also sold some works from the collection including, in July 1941, agroup of eighteen pictures (including the Virgin and Child with parrot by Bruges School in this sale) to Hans Posse for the Führermuseum, all of which were re-acquired after the War.

Van Beuningen's taste was expansive to say the least. As well as seventeenth century Dutch pictures, here exemplified by the beautiful Dou de-accessioned from Munich in 1937, he also bought Flemish, Italian, German and Spanish pictures – all of which are represented in this sale. Early Netherlandish paintings were perhaps where his passion ran deepest. His acquisition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel in 1936, together with the Cook Van Eyck, were regarded by Friedländer as Van Beuningen’s crowning achievement as a collector and they remain two of the outstanding masterpieces in the museum today.

The pictures in this auction were held back by the family from the sale to the museum in 1958 and have remained their treasured possessions ever since. Together they offer a remarkable cross-section of one of the greatest art collections ever formed in the Netherlands.

Selected Highlights

Christie’s Classic Week forms part of our programme of auctions, exhibitions and activities for the ‘London Summer Season’ in celebration of the dynamism and creativity London inspires.

(Press Release)