This Rare Mannerist Painting by a 17th-Century Italian Nun Just Broke a Record at Sotheby’s, Selling for 14 Times Its High Estimate

The market fervor for once-forgotten female Old Masters shows no
sign of slowing. At Sotheby’s London on May 7, an oil painting by
Italian Mannerist painter Orsola Maddalena Caccia
(1596–1676) sold for £212,500 ($264,350)—more than 14 times
its high presale estimate of £15,000 ($118,700).

The sale smashed the existing auction record for a work by the
artist of €32,500 ($35,733), set at Dorotheum in Vienna in October
2018, according to the Artnet Price Database. Of the 12 recorded
auction sales of works by the artist, only three others had hit
five figures, while five failed to find buyers.

“Works by Caccia are very rare,” Andrew Fletcher, a senior
director of Old Master and British paintings at Sotheby’s, told
Artnet News. “She is not a name any collectors will have come
across and the scarcity of her works means they are unlikely to
come across her again soon. I expect something else by the artist
will emerge from the woodwork in light of this result, but I am
certainly not expecting an avalanche, largely because so few
exist.”

The record-setting canvas by the artist, who often incorporated
birds into her paintings as religious symbols, was an unexpected
highlight of the sale, which was made up of Old Master works and
portrait miniatures from the Pohl-Ströher collection.

The sale totaled £3.4 million ($4.2 million), more than
doubling the low end of its presale estimate (£1.5 million to £2.1
million, or $1.9 million to $2.6 million), with a sell through rate
of 86 percent.

A nun from Moncalvo, Italy, Caccia was the daughter of a painter
and trained as his assistant before entering religious life. After
his death, Caccia ran a studio in her convent and instructed other
nuns, including one of her sisters. Caccia eventually became the
abbess, and her commissions helped support the religious
community.

The sale’s top lot was a picture of Saint John the
Baptist in a landscape by Bernardo Zenale (1436–1526), which
fetched £225,000 ($279,900) against an estimate of just £20,000 to
£30,000 ($24,900 to £37,300). The artist’s previous auction record,
for the first work by him ever to appear at auction, was
just 42,550,000 Lira ($24,767), set in 1995.

Yesterday’s sale also included Yeomanry Scouts on the
Veldt, a painting by the Victorian war
painter Elizabeth Southerden
Thompson 1846–1933), or Lady Butler, as she was called
after her marriage to lieutenant general sir William Butler. She
counted Queen Victoria among her collectors; the painting on offer
was painted during one of Lady Butler’s husband’s military
campaigns, and was consigned to auction by the Downtown Abbey
General Trust, of public television fame. It sold for £12,500
($15,450), against an estimate of £10,000 to £15,000 ($12,450
to $18,670).

The market for works by female old masters has exploded in
recent years. In 2019, pop star and fashion mogul Victoria Beckham lent her
star power to Old Masters Week at Sotheby’s New York, where 21
works by 14 female artists were sold under the banner “The
Female Triumphant.” That included the record-setting $7.2 million
sale of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Portrait of
Muhammad Dervish Khan (1788).

Last November, another work, by Baroque painter Artemisa Gentileschi, set a
new auction record for the artist when it sold for €4.8
million ($5.28 million) at Artcurial in Paris. Fletcher
attributed the growing interest for such artists to the success of
the Caccia painting.

“I doubt three years ago we would have seen such a price,”
he said. “This was both by a female artist and an enchanting
painting, easy on the eye and easy to live with—a perfect
combination.”

The post This Rare Mannerist Painting by a 17th-Century
Italian Nun Just Broke a Record at Sotheby’s, Selling for 14 Times
Its High Estimate appeared first on artnet News.