Christie’s to Offer Two Landscapes by Lucian Freud in London

Two landscapes by Lucian Freud previously in the collection of British businessman and philanthropist Simon Sainsbury will be offered next month at Christie’s in London, the auction house announced Friday.

Separately, Sotheby’s released additional highlights of its upcoming Masters Week in New York, including an over 400-year-old Anthony Van Dyke painting, A Sketch for Saint Jerome, that was found in a farm shed in the late 20th century in New York. The auction house expects to bring in more than US$100 million from across nine sales running now until early February.

Christie’s sale of the two Freud landscapes will take place on the evening of Feb. 28 in London. Offered by the same private collector, both paintings were formerly in the collection of Sainsbury, whose family founded Sainsbury’s, the second largest chain of supermarkets in the U.K. Upon his death in 2006 at the age of 76, Sainsbury bequeathed the majority of his art collection, estimated to be worth £100 million at the time, to the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London.

One of the paintings, Scillonian Beachscape from 1945-46, will make its first public appearance on the market since 1974 and has a presale estimate of between £3.5 million and £5.5 million (US$4.3 million and US$6.8 million). Depicting a dreamlike coastal scene in lush, sun-drenched color, it was inspired by Freud’s visit to the Isles of Scilly and directly based on his drawing, Untitled, which sold for £138,600 at Christie’s in London last October.

The other, Garden from the Window, depicts the artist’s garden at 138 Kensington Church Street. It was first unveiled at the Tate in London in 2002, and its debut auction at Christie’s is expected to fetch £2.5 million and £3.5 million.

“Lucian Freud, revered as one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, continually returned to the natural world as a source of rich inspiration throughout his career. This lifelong fascination is perfectly encapsulated in these two exquisite paintings which offer viewers insight into both his early and late life,” Tessa Lord, acting head of department of Post-War and contemporary art at Christie’s London, said in a news release.

The National Gallery in London has recently organized a centenary retrospective “Lucian Freud: New Perspectives,” which will move to Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional in Madrid in February.

Freud’s auction record was set by his painting large interior w11 (after watteau), 1981-83, from the collection of Paul Allen. It sold for US$86.3 million last November at Christie’s in New York.

Meanshile, t Sotheby’s, its first major sale of the year will be its Masters Week in New York, which is expected to bring in more than US$100 million across nine sales that will run through early February.

The sales will be led by 10 Baroque masterpieces from the collection of Mark Fisch, a real estate developer and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and his ex-wife, Rachel Davidson, a former New Jersey judge. The two filed for divorce last year. Highlighting the collection, to be auctioned next Thursday, is a 1609 Rubens masterpiece, Salome Presented with The Severed Head of Saint John the Baptist, with an estimate of between US$25 million and US$35 million.

The sales also include The One, a new format sale featuring one-of-a-kind objects throughout history. This sale will be led by Kobe Bryant’s Lakers jersey with a high estimate of US$7 million, and a Princess Diana’s dress, with a presale estimate between US$80,000 and US$120,000.

A Sketch for Saint Jerome from 1615-18 by Anthony Van Dyck that was discovered in the late 20th century in a farm shed in Kinderhook, N.Y., will be offered in the region of US$2 million and US$3 million. A portion of proceeds from the sale will benefit the Albert B. Roberts Foundation, which supports artists and other creatives.

Roberts, a collector of “lost” pieces, purchased the sketch for US$600. Soon afterwards, the sketch was recognized by art historian Susan J. Barnes as a “surprisingly well preserved” autograph work by Van Dyck, according to Sotheby’s.

He died in August 2021 at the age of 89.

As the war against Hamas dragged into 2024, there were worries here that investment would dry up in Israel’s globally important technology sector, as much of the world became angry against the casualties in Gaza and recoiled at the unstable security situation.

In fact, a new survey found investment into Israeli technology startups grew 28% last year to $10.6 billion. The influx buoyed Israel’s economy and helped it maintain a war footing on several battlefronts.

The increase marks a turnaround for Israeli startups, which had experienced a decline in investments in 2023 to $8.3 billion, a drop blamed in part on an effort to overhaul the country’s judicial system and the initial shock of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 attack.

Tech investment in Israel remains depressed from years past. It is still just a third of the almost $30 billion in private investments raised in 2021, a peak after which Israel followed the U.S. into a funding market downturn.

Any increase in Israeli technology investment defied expectations though. The sector is responsible for 20% of Israel’s gross domestic product and about 10% of employment. It contributed directly to 2.2% of GDP growth in the first three quarters of the year, according to Startup Nation Central—without which Israel would have been on a negative growth trend, it said.

“If you asked me a year before if I expected those numbers, I wouldn’t have,” said Avi Hasson, head of Startup Nation Central, the Tel Aviv-based nonprofit that tracks tech investments and released the investment survey.

Israel’s tech sector is among the world’s largest technology hubs, especially for startups. It has remained one of the most stable parts of the Israeli economy during the 15-month long war, which has taxed the economy and slashed expectations for growth to a mere 0.5% in 2024.

Industry investors and analysts say the war stifled what could have been even stronger growth. The survey didn’t break out how much of 2024’s investment came from foreign sources and local funders.

“We have an extremely innovative and dynamic high tech sector which is still holding on,” said Karnit Flug, a former governor of the Bank of Israel and now a senior fellow at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, a think tank. “It has recovered somewhat since the start of the war, but not as much as one would hope.”

At the war’s outset, tens of thousands of Israel’s nearly 400,000 tech employees were called into reserve service and companies scrambled to realign operations as rockets from Gaza and Lebanon pounded the country. Even as operations normalized, foreign airlines overwhelmingly cut service to Israel, spooking investors and making it harder for Israelis to reach their customers abroad.

An explosion in negative global sentiment toward Israel introduced a new form of risk in doing business with Israeli companies. Global ratings firms lowered Israel’s credit rating over uncertainty caused by the war.

Israel’s government flooded money into the economy to stabilize it shortly after war broke out in October 2023. That expansionary fiscal policy, economists say, stemmed what was an initial economic contraction in the war’s first quarter and helped Israel regain its footing, but is now resulting in expected tax increases to foot the bill.

The 2024 boost was led by investments into Israeli cybersecurity companies, which captured about 40% of all private capital raised, despite representing only 7% of Israeli tech companies. Many of Israel’s tech workers have served in advanced military-technology units, where they can gain experience building products. Israeli tech products are sometimes tested on the battlefield. These factors have led to its cybersecurity companies being dominant in the global market, industry experts said.

The number of Israeli defense-tech companies active throughout 2024 doubled, although they contributed to a much smaller percentage of the overall growth in investments. This included some startups which pivoted to the area amid a surge in global demand spurred by the war in Ukraine and at home in Israel. Funding raised by Israeli defense-tech companies grew to $165 million in 2024, from $19 million the previous year.

“The fact that things are literally battlefield proven, and both the understanding of the customer as well as the ability to put it into use and to accelerate the progress of those technologies, is something that is unique to Israel,” said Hasson.

Christie’s to Offer Two Landscapes by Lucian Freud in London

The 28% increase buoyed the country as it battled on several fronts but investment remains down from 2021