In the week of September 17 – 22, 2012 Koller Swiss Auction House will offer at auction old masters, important furniture and applied arts, jewellery and wristwatches, as well as rare manuscripts and books. The most spectacular lot is a painting by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya, which hung for over 80 years unrecognised in a private collection and has now been rediscovered, Art Daily said.
The main lot at Koller’s Old Master auction in Zurich on 21 September will be an early work by the important Spanish painter Francisco de Goya.
The 91.5×125 cm painting depicts the biblical scene “Lot and his daughters”. The sky is coloured red by the flames from Sodom burning in the valley behind the trees. In the literature on the celebrated Spanish painter the work is usually dated to the second half of the 1770s.
Goya, who was born in 1746, returned to Spain in 1771 after his Italian journey. In Spain he was occupied with commissions for churches and monasteries amongst other things and, from 1776, he began the designs for the wall hangings which would decorate the royal palaces of El Pardo and El Escorial. The painting, which has now come to auction at Koller, was in a private collection in Bilbao until the 1920s, and was then sold to a collector: the painting remained, unrecognised, with the collector’s family until today.
Now, with the review of the estate, it has been rediscovered as a work by Goya which had been missing for over 80 years. The auction of this painting is nothing less than sensational, with fewer than 10 works worldwide by the hand of the famous Spaniard coming to auction in the last 20 years. An early work of this importance by Goya has never come to auction in that period (estimate CHF 600 000 / 800 000).
