Lucian Freud’s Portrait of His Daughter Debuts at Auction With an Estimate Over $18 Million

A portrait Lucian Freud painted of his daughter Isobel in 1997 will make its auction debut on March 1 at Sotheby’s London, with an estimate of between £15 million and £20 million (US$18 million and US$24 million).

Painted over a year with more than 70 sittings, the portrait depicts Isobel Boyt, known as Ib to her family, reading Marcel Proust’s 4,000-page novel Remembrance of Things Past, wearing a loose dress, with her bare feet up on a chair and the book in her lap.

The portrait, aptly titled Ib Reading, was acquired by a private collector shortly after its creation and has remained in the same collection since. It was last seen publicly more than 20 years ago in an exhibition in New York, according to Sotheby’s.

The portrait will be offered as a highlight of Sotheby’s evening auction of modern and contemporary art.

Other star lots of the sale include Pablo Picasso’s portrait of his daughter, Maya, formerly owned by Gianni Versace and estimated to sell for between £12 million and £20 million; a newly restituted painting by Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau mit Kirche II, which is expected to fetch in the region of £35 million; and one of Gerhard Richter’s Abstract masterpieces, Abstraktes Bild, estimated in excess of £20 million.

Freud’s Ib Reading is one of five painted portraits of his daughter. The first was Large Interior, Paddington (1968-69), which was made when Isobel was just seven years old. The portrait is now in the collection of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain, which is hosting a major retrospective of the artist, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, until June.

In 1992, Freud also painted Isobel with the father of her children, while she was pregnant with her youngest daughter Alice.

“My father never chose the pose of his sitters. He would often make suggestions, but he never said, ‘I want you wearing this and sitting there’. There were limited possibilities with the studio too,” Isobel, 60, said in a statement through Sotheby’s.

Reading the novel Remembrance of Things Past while sitting for her father was her own choice, she said in the statement. “I wished to read. It was something I normally wouldn’t have time to do with three young children. It was an opportunity,” she said.

Freud’s auction record was set by his painting Large Interior W11 (After Watteau), 1981-83, which sold from the collection of Paul Allen for US$86.3 million last November at Christie’s in New York.

Could a recession be the best time to launch a tech startup?

A recent study suggests that is the case. The authors found that tech startups that began operations during the 2007-09 recession—and received their first patent in that time—tended to last longer than tech startups founded a few years before or after. And those recession-era companies also tended to be more innovative than the rest.

“The effect of macroeconomic trends is not always intuitive,” says Daniel Bias , an assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, who co-wrote the paper with Alexander Ljungqvist, Stefan Persson Family Chair in Entrepreneurial Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Drawing on data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the authors examined a sample of 6,946 tech startups that launched and received their first patent approval between 2002 and 2012.

One group—about 5,734 companies—launched and got their patent outside of the 2007-09 recession. Of those, about 70% made it to their seventh year. But the startups that launched and got their first patent during the recession—about 1,212 companies—were 12% more likely to be in business in their seventh year.

These recession-era firms were also more likely to file a novel and influential patent after their first one. (That is, a patent the researchers determined was dissimilar to patents in the same niche that came before it, but similar to ones that came after it.)

So, why did these recession-era firms outperform their peers? Labor markets played a big role.

A widespread lack of available jobs meant that the startups were able to land more productive and innovative employees, especially in their research and development groups, and then hold on to them. More important, the tight labor markets also meant that the founding inventors—the people named on the very first patent—were more likely to stick around rather than try for opportunities elsewhere.

For startups started during the 2007-09 recession, founding inventors were 25 percentage points less likely to leave their company within the first three years. On average, about 43% of founding inventors in the entire sample left their startup within the first three years.

“Our study really highlights the importance of labor retention for young innovative startups. Retaining founding inventors cannot only help them survive, but also thrive,” Bias says.

Lucian Freud’s Portrait of His Daughter Debuts at Auction With an Estimate Over $18 Million

A study suggests that when jobs are hard to come by, the best workers are more available—and stay longer