A death mask of the Viennese painter Egon Schiele has sold at auction for £19,000 ($24,600), nearly 10 times its pre-sale estimate.
Gustinus Ambrosi’s The Death Mask of Egon Schiele (1918) was one of nearly 600 lots that appeared on the block at Sloane Street Auctions’ “20th Century, Modern and Old Masters, Islamic and Asian Art and Jewelry” on October 23 with the London auction house calling the mask “exceedingly rare.”
Schiele died in 1918 from the Spanish Flu epidemic that was sweeping across Europe in the waning months of the First World War–it also took his pregnant wife Edith. Two days later, Ambrosi, an ambitious young sculptor, arrived at Schiele’s coffin, removed the painter’s collar and tie (he was sporting a dinner jacket) and made a plaster mold for a death mask under the clear blue sky of a November morning.
Gustinus Ambrosi, The Death Mask of Egon Schiele (1918). Photo: Sloane Street Auctions.
As Ambrosi would later recount in a letter, he made four copies of the mask: one for himself, one for Schiele’s mother, one for Arthur Roessler (an art critic who first recognized Schiele’s talent), and one for his publisher Richard Lanyi. Sloane Street Auctions says it’s unclear if any additional copies were ever made.
Despite Ambrosi’s keen admiration of Schiele, whom he called the “Raphael of Expressionists,” the two men never met in life, though they would both be selected in 1925 to represent Austria at the 1925 Biennale in Rome.
Sir Alfred Munnings, Dedham Mill Pool (ca. 1930). Photo: courtesy Sloane Street Auctions.
Buddhist sculpture, Orientalist painting, Persian rugs, art deco jewelry, avant-garde furniture, and Renaissance Madonnas were among the auction’s extremely wide-ranging offerings.
The leading lot was Dedham Mill Pool by Alfred Munnings, best-known for painting horses. It’s an oil painting depicting the watery landscape near to the Essex house in which Munnings spent the last four decades of his life and sold for £48,000 ($62,300) well above its high estimate.
Attributed to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Study of a girl in a hat (unknown). Photo: courtesy Sloane Street Auctions.
Study of a girl in a hat, a swirling pink-tinted oil painting that has been attributed to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, sold for £38,000 ($49,300), nearly five times its presale estimate. A painting by the avant-garde 20th-century Russian painter Robert Falk of a red cabin in a bucolic country scene also sold for £38,000 ($49,300).
“This is exactly the range and quality of items that used to be offered by Christie’s South Kensington before it closed,” Sloane Street’s Daniel Hunt said in reference to the now shuttered West London branch of the auction house. “We are happy to don that mantle.”