Two paintings by the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya will go up for auction next January in New York with an estimated joint value of between 15 and 20 million dollars and the potential to break the artist's sales record, explained Christie's, in charge of the sale. These are oil on canvas portraits of two women, Leonora Antonia Valdés de Barruso and María Vicenta Barruso Valdés (mother and daughter) who pose seated wearing empire-cut dresses in pastel tones and flowers in their hair, and a small dog in the lap in the case of the young woman.
The two works (which are being sold together) contain inscriptions with the names of the subjects, the author and the date of 1805, and will be part of a Great Masters auction during Christie's Classic Art Week in the Big Apple, which returns to be held in January after six years scheduled in April.
The price of between 15 and 20 million at which the paintings are estimated far exceeds the record for a Goya work, set at 7.9 million dollars in 2008 for three sketches by the artist. Goya's most expensive painting is Suerte de varas, which reached 7.4 million three decades ago.
The two Goyas, which will go on sale on January 27, come from an "important family collection" and were exhibited for a few months in 2008 at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid in an exhibition dedicated to Goya in times of war, according to Christie's data. According to the website of the Goya Foundation in Aragon, the works, which "can be considered the first portraits of bourgeois women", belonged to the Stanislas Orossen collection until around 1925 and then passed into other private hands.
Christie's Classic Art Week in New York includes a sale of 86 pieces from the collection of Swiss billionaire J.E. Safra (January 25), another sale of Great Masters (January 27) with 62 pieces and another from a collection located in the city that contains 25 pieces (January 27). The house indicated that it will exhibit in London starting this Tuesday the highlights of its Grand Masters auction.
