£500 unknown portrait could be £5m Titian

And now lot 403: the Old Master worth £5m. Do I hear £300?

Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Wednesday July 18, 2007
The Guardian

The painting was just one among a motley selection up for auction in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. There was a sentimental picture of gambolling terriers ("English school, estimate £150-200"); cottagey views; harvest scenes; Scottish waterfalls: a rollcall of pastiches, non-entities and plain old fit-for-the-dustbin disasters.
And then there was lot 403. Described in the auctioneer's catalogue as "18th-century continental school, half-length portrait of an aesthete", it depicted a black-clad, bearded man, his face half turned to the right, a rather distant, soulful expression in his eyes.

The estimate on the picture was £300-£500. When its turn came last Tuesday at Gilding's - a small, family-run auction house that holds about 45 sales per year - something truly extraordinary happened. "The atmosphere in the room became very tense - the bidding just went on and on," said the auctioneer, Mark Gilding. The final hammer price was £205,000.
And, enormous as the figure may seem, that's just the start of it. The London fine art trade is now abuzz: this painting is very probably a Titian, painted in Venice between about 1510 and 1520. And as such, its real market value is likely to be upwards of £5m.

A mystery remains: who bought, or indeed sold, the painting? Simon Dickinson, one of the most distinguished Old Master dealers in the UK, said yesterday: "I wish I knew - I've been trying to find out. No one seems to know; I've rung round most people." Christopher Foley, a dealer, was also in the dark, despite the phone ringing off the hook. "That price suggests that two people knew what it was: one of them perhaps young and clever, with a budget of £200,000. And someone else." Mr Gilding will say only that the buyer was someone "in the London trade"; and that the vendor was a private individual, a woman living locally, who bought the painting from a contents sale in 1974 from a house in the village of Great Glen, Leicestershire.

What is not thought to be in doubt is the painting's quality. Though Mr Dickinson stressed he has studied only an emailed photograph, he said: "It looks very good. It looks like perfect early Titian ... the handling looks like early Titian, the way the shirt is painted, and the face. The ear looks a bit clumsy, as if it's been repainted. But it looks jolly good."

And its value? "It depends on the condition, but it could be worth a great deal. Quite a few million. Yes, perhaps around £5m."

According to Mr Foley it "just screams quality". "Someone's done something very clever," he said. He believes the picture will now disappear from view while the buyer seeks cast-iron authentication. Then it will probably re-emerge on the market with a hugely enhanced price tag.

The trade - with one mystery exception - is kicking itself for missing the kind of bargain that is the stuff of mythology. "If I had had any idea about it, I would have been on the next plane," said Mr Foley, who is in France.

Or, to look at it from another perspective, the National Gallery was last year unable to purchase Titian's Portrait of a Young Man, previously on loan from the Earl of Halifax, despite offering the equivalent, with tax advantages, of £55m. That picture is believed to date from the same period as the Leicestershire painting, and has similarities in the pose and expression of the sitter, and the paint handling. Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery, said he had not heard about the Leicestershire painting but asked if he thought it was a bargain, he said: "Looks like it."

How did this gem slip past the gimlet eyes of the fine art trade? Mr Gilding said: "Our opinion was it was 18th century, after an early Italian artist. Obviously a couple of people thought differently: two people on the day turned up and battled it out.

"The people bidding on it handle these things day in, day out. On this occasion, as a provincial auctioneer, we bow to their superior knowledge."

The recent history of the painting is that it was sold in 1974, along with the rest of the contents of Glen House in Great Glen, two years after the death of Colonel John Puxley White Jamie.

The local woman who bought it hung on to it, undoubtedly in ignorance of its true potential value, for 33 years. "We talked over the catalogue entry with the vendor. She was happy with the entry. And the vendor is extremely happy with the result," said Mr Gilding. Whether her joy will pall somewhat if the painting sells at a later stage for a seven-figure sum remains to be seen.