A frequenter of analog auctions, clever and confidant in his ability to spot forgeries and potential fortunes, recently snapped up a lost, original Salvador Dalí for just £150.
Amounting to $180 or thereabouts, it’s certainly a bargain considering its being re-sold by Cambridge for as much as 200-times that much.
Vecchio Sultano, or Old Sultan, was painted by Dalí in 1966. The mixed-media artwork was one in a whopping commission the great Surrealist painter received for 500 illustrations inspired by The Arabian Nights.
According to the Guardian, Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto were an Italian couple who commissioned the illustrations from Dalí, while Rizzoli, an Italian publishing house, was planning to publish them. However, Dalí abandoned the project with just 100 of the 500 illustrations finished.
Half were retained by the Albarettos, and the other half went unpublished and are presumed lost.
“Dalí was quite obsessed with Moorish culture and believed himself to be from a Moorish line,” Gabrielle Downie, a fine art specialist at Cheffins in Cambridge, told the Guardian.
An antiquities dealer speaking to the Guardian under the auction name John Russel said that he encountered the painting at a purely in-person auction that was clearing out the effects of a London apartment.
In these cases, Russell says, one just shows up and discovers treasures, or trash as the case may be, but you know that no one beyond the room can see what’s being bid on.
“Most of the time, I buy stuff that I like. On this occasion, I was really taking a bit of a punt, because I wasn’t sure I’d have it on the wall, to be honest … I do like some unusual art, but you’d have to love it, wouldn’t you?” said Russell.
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On Russell’s point, it is quite a striking departure from Dalí’s associated style and iconography. Despite being listed as an original Dalí, the auction hall was silent apart from Russell and one other bidder who tapped out after the price reached £150.
But priding himself on being able to spot a forgery from years of watching the British television show Fake or Fortune, and a closer examination revealing stickers on the back of the frame that indicated it had been sold at Sotheby’s, confirmed to Russell that it must be an original.
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That turned out to be the case—after he went home and bought the Sotheby’s auction catalogue in which Vecchio Sultano had been sold and found that on the occasion of that previous sale, it had been verified as original by a renowned Dalí scholar.
It’s now going up for sale at Cheffins Fine Art and is expected to fetch between $25,000 and $37,000.
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