Highest Ever

It was, in a sense, a limbering-up exercise. When Diego Velasquez was living in Rome in 1649, he was summoned to paint the portrait of Pope Innocent X. The artist was out of practice; he had done no heads for some years. So, to get his hand in, Velasquez decided to make a portrait of his color grinder and studio hand, a husky mulatto slave named Juan de Pareja. Roman cognoscenti greeted it, according to one of Velasquez's contemporaries, "with admiration and astonishment," and from then on this aloof, brooding presence on canvas with the liquid black eyes remained one of the most admired, if least seen, of all Velasquez's portraits.

Sir William Hamilton, husband of Lord Nelson's celebrated mistress, Emma, bought it from a Neapolitan collection. In 1801 it was sold at Christies' for 39 guineas, and ten years later, the second Earl of Radnor bought it. It stayed sequestered in the Radnor family seat, Longford Castle, until recently --when the eighth Earl sent it back to Christies' to help pay duties on his father's estate.

This time bidding opened at 300,000 guineas ($756,000) and just two minutes and 15 seconds later it closed at 2,200,000 guineas--$5,544,000, the highest price ever paid for any work of art. The expensive transaction eclipsed both the previous public-auction record, $2.3 million in 1961 for Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, and the record for a private sale, an estimated $5,000,000 that was paid in 1967 for Leonardo's Ginevra dei Bend, by Washington's National Gallery of Art. The buyer of the Velasquez, Alec Wildenstein, 30, vice president of the New York firm of Wildenstein, firmly denied that he was acting on behalf of any art collector. Said he: "To buy this painting at that price is no risk. This is really cheap." Still, the expansive price staggered most art experts. "I'm stunned--knocked out," declared Perry Rathbone. director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. "No museum purchase funds can keep up with prices like that." Perhaps not. But Boston was sufficiently interested in the auction to discuss with Thomas Moving, director of New York's Metropolitan Museum, "half in jest, but half seriously," the idea that Boston and the Met pool their available funds to buy the Velasquez. The underbidder at Friday's auction, a firm of London dealers named Thomas Agnew. was rumored to be bidding on behalf of Washington's National Gallery.

Juan de Pareja is a remarkable painting, but it is not the best Velasquez. His Rokeby Venus at Britain's National Gallery, for instance, is far more important. Similarly, the Met's Aristotle is not the best Rembrandt. The dazzling prices such paintings fetch are merely reflections of the fact that there are few Old Masters left outside museums.

The Velasquez sale was an economic event, not an aesthetic one. Said one dealer: "It's not so much that art prices rise, it's more that the value of money keeps falling."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.