Through the Ages belongs unmistakably to the second category. Assembled over decades by a single, deeply committed collector, the collection encompasses more than 900 works spanning millennia and continents — from Roman imperial marble, Old Master paintings, ancient Near Eastern ceramics, Islamic court carpets, and royal French furniture to Impressionist masterworks and exceptional 20th century design.
This October, Sotheby's will present this collection across an immersive public exhibition at the Breuer, opening October 17 and running through October 22, with works displayed across four floors of the building. Highlights from the collection will then be offered across an historic series of four single-owner sales in New York, together comprising more than 600 works and estimated to realize in excess of $60 million. Unfolding over four consecutive days, the series opens with the Magnum Opus Evening Auction, showcasing the collection's most exceptional masterworks across categories.
Ancient Sculpture and Works of Art
At the heart of the collection's engagement with antiquity is a conviction that ancient objects are not relics but living presences, fragments of a shared cultural inheritance that retain their power to command, to move and to speak. The collector approached ancient art in the tradition of the great Renaissance studioli, treating each work as both an aesthetic object and a vessel of accumulated human meaning, a philosophy borne out by an unwavering commitment to scholarship, condition and provenance that distinguishes every work in this section of the collection.
The most commanding of these is a marble torso of a Roman emperor, Julio-Claudian period, from the first half of the 1st century A.D. (estimate: $8-12 million). Marked by a convergence of powerful iconography, pristinely preserved condition and provenance history, this torso stands as the most important Roman Imperial sculpture to come to auction in over a decade, and is the only known example outside of an institutional collection. Its provenance is well documented and includes an extensive publication history beginning in 1926. Probably representing Augustus, Tiberius or Claudius, this torso represents a visual embodiment of the beginning of the Roman empire’s language of political power and martial authority. It draws a clear comparison to one of the most widely recognized sculptures from the Imperial period: the Augustus Prima Porta, now a hallmark of the Vatican Museums collections. The carving achieves a vitality that seems to defy the inherent weight of stone, with finely articulated fringed lappets capturing movement in marble. The relief decoration across the cuirass remains crisp and commanding: the god Sol emerges in his chariot above winged Victories flanking a trophy, imagery that speaks to the absolute authority of imperial rule.
Its counterpart in spirit is an Augustan marble portrait head of a girl, 27 B.C. to A.D. 14 (estimate: $2.5- 3.5 million). Where the imperial torso commands through sheer physical force, this exquisite head achieves something quieter yet no less powerful: a portrait of dignity, restraint and idealized beauty. The softly modeled face, wide contemplative eyes and precisely articulated coiffure are images after Livia, Emperor Augustus’ formidable wife and the defining model of Roman female virtue and dynastic power. It has been a part of the prestigious von Schwarzenberg Collection and, prior to that, the collection of Sir D'Arcy Osborne, the 12th Duke of Leeds. It is among the finest female portrait heads to appear on the antiquities market in decades.
Old Master Painting
The Old Master paintings in the collection range across genre, region and century, yet they are bound by a quality that transcends period and subject: an almost uncanny command of light. From the flickering shadows that move across the face of Fragonard's elderly subject to the warm diagonal gleam that sparks off the water and sculpts the architecture in Canaletto's view of Venice. In this, the Old Masters in the collection speak directly to the Impressionist and Modern works that surround them in the collector's home, revealing a sensibility drawn not to any single school or tradition but to the enduring formal qualities that make a painting live.
The anchor of the selection is Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto's
Venice, a View of the Grand Canal Looking East with Santa Maria della Salute (estimate: $6-8 million). Painted circa 1740 during the height of Canaletto's Venetian period, the work offers a majestic bird's eye view of the landing stage before the Salute, the great votive church consecrated by the Venetian Senate in thanksgiving for the city's deliverance from the plague of 1630. The warm sunlight and clear shadows evoke a peaceful afternoon on the Grand Canal, populated with gondolas, merchant ships and figures moving in and out of Longhena's magnificent church. The painting was previously in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and stands among the most accomplished treatments of this celebrated subject in Canaletto's work.
Luis Meléndez's Oranges, Nuts, Spices, Boxes of Sweetmeats, a Jug and a Cask on a Table (estimate: $4-6 million) represents the height of achievement by one of the great still life painters of the European tradition. Meléndez's path to this mastery was shaped by circumstance: early ambitions as a history painter were derailed by his expulsion from the Academy, leading to independent study in Naples and an exposure to the tenebrist tradition that would come to define his work. The result is a painting of extraordinary technical precision, its everyday objects transformed through meticulous observation into a composition of remarkable luminosity and depth. This work held the world auction record for the artist from its 2012 sale until just last year at Sotheby’s where Meléndez's Still Life with a Cauliflower, A Basket with Eggs, Leeks, and Fish, and Assorted Kitchen Utensils achieved $6.2 million.
Jacob van Ruisdael's panoramic view of Haarlem, View of Haarlem from the Northwest (estimate: $2.5-3.5 million), captures the city on a breezy summer afternoon seen from the dunes to the northwest across the expansive bleaching fields. One of the celebrated series of painted panoramasthe artist produced throughout the 1660s and early 1670s, the work is distinguished by its dynamic interplay of warm and cool tones, towering cumulus clouds casting shifting patterns of light and shadow across the city and its surroundings.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Head of an Old Man (estimate: $1-1.5 million), belongs to a select group of character heads the artist produced from the mid-1760s to early 1770s, works that reveal his deep engagement with Rembrandt's dramatic use of light and shadow while showcasing a freedom and energy of brushwork that anticipates the Impressionists by nearly a century.
Francesco Guardi's View of the south bank of the Grand Canal, with Ca' Pesaro (estimate: $1,000,000 - 1,500,000), is unquestionably the finest and most important drawing by the artist to remain in private hands. Drawn with an almost painterly quality and executed on an unusually large scale, this exquisitely preserved sheet depicts the splendor of Venice through its portrayal of the Grand Canal and the imposing presence of Ca' Pesaro, one of the city's most important Baroque palaces.
The strong Venetian theme found within the Old Master Drawings from the collection continues with three quintessential examples by the great Venetian master, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, including two exceptional sheets from his celebrated series illustrating scenes from the life of Punchinello, representing The Nursing of Punchinello (estimate: $200,000 - 300,000) and Punchinello is Viewed by Mourners (estimate: $400,000 - 600,000).
