Vincent van Gogh’s Les canots amarrés, which has been sitting in collection of the Royal Family of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, will hit the auction block this fall for the first time in three decades. Expected to fetch HK$230 million to HK$380 million ($30 million to $50 million), it will be offered at Christie’s 20th/21st Century evening art sale that will inaugurate the house’s new Asia headquarters in Hong Kong on September 26.
Conceived during Van Gogh’s two-year stay in Paris, the work was painted in the summer of 1887 at Asnières, depicting the serene riverscape of the suburb located northwest of French capital. The guaranteed work is set to break the artist’s auction record in Asia and may become the most expensive work from the artist’s Paris period. The current record for the artist in the region was set in 2021 at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale for Still Life: Vase With Gladioli, sold for HK$71 million ($9.1 million).
This Van Gogh painting joins Monet’s Nymphéas, which is expected to fetch HK$200 million to HK$280 million ($25 million to $35 million), as well as Zao Wou-ki’s abstract work 05.06.80–Triptyque (1980), which has an estimate of HK$78 million to HK$128 million ($10 million to $15 million), in headlining the new HQ’s sale room.
Auction houses have been cultivating the Asian market for Western art for more than a decade but they did not bring blue-chip Western art to Asian auctions until recent years. Names such as Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, and Modigliani have been well-received among affluent Asian collectors in recent years, particularly the Chinese. Currently, the record for the most expensive Western artwork sold in Asia remains with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting Warrior, sold in 2021 for HK$323.6 million ($41.7 million) at a Christie’s Hong Kong sale.
Vincent van Gogh’s Nature Morte: Vase Aux Glaïeuls (1886) sold for $9.1 million in 2021. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The work is offered by “a Family Trust represented by The Royal Family of Bourbon Two-Sicilies and Mr Patrick L. Abraham.” The seller is Princess Camilla of the Bourbon-Two Sicilies family who owns the painting through a family trust, The Art Newspaper reported, whereas Abraham is a family friend and trustee.
The House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies is a cadet branch of the Bourbon family that reigned over Sicily and southern Italy between 1734 and 1860. The throne does not exist any more and the family is divided into two branches. One is headed by Prince Carlos, who married Camilla in 1998. Together they live between Rome, Monaco, and Paris with their two daughters, Princess Maria Carolina and Princess Maria Chiara.
Princess Camilla is the daughter of Italian billionaire Camillo Crociani and his wife, Italian actress Edy Vessel, who acquired the Van Gogh painting at a Sotheby’s London sale in 1991, according to TAN. The work sold for £1.4 million (an equivalent to $2.5 million at the time), according to Artnet Price Database.
Les canots amarrés is said to be part of the “Bord de la Seine à Asnières” triptych. The other two works of this trio are Ponts sur la Seine à Asnières, which is in the Emil Bührle Collection, Kunsthaus Zurich, and Restaurant de la Sirene, Asnières, which is housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
One of the most internationally renowned Impressionist artists, Van Gogh has been the subject of multiple institutional shows in the last year that revisit his legacy. The latest among these is “Poets and Lovers” at the National Gallery in London, which opens September 14. The blockbuster show marks the 200th anniversary of the institution will feature more than 50 works from the museum’s collection and on loan from other museum and private collections.
Among the highlights are the reunion of the pair sunflower paintings, the first time after 125 years. The one created in August 1888 resides with the National Gallery, which acquired the work from the family in 1924; the other work created a few months later in 1889 was purchased by Carroll Tyson of Philadelphia in 1935 and has since been in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The London exhibition will mark the first time this sunflower painting leaving the U.S. for the first time.