Painting This article is more than 13 years oldStubbs painting expected to fetch record £15m at auction
This article is more than 13 years oldPainting of mares and foals in 'remarkable condition', and Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt works also for sale at Sotheby'sA painting of mares and foals, which has been in the same family collection since George Stubbs painted it in 1768, is expected to set a new record for the artist's work of up to £15m when auctioned at Sotheby's next week.
"It is a quintessential Stubbs, in remarkable condition," said Emmeline Hallmark, a British paintings expert at Sotheby's. "The current record is just under £4m, so we're very confident for it."
The painting shows the group of horses against an ambiguous landscape, on one side idyllic open countryside, on the other a menacing dark crag. "It's painted very caringly, with everything they might need to thrive: shelter, water from the river, hay for them probably growing in the far field," Hallmark said. "It is a very moving work."
The painting is on display at Sotheby's until the sale next Wednesday, only the second time it has been publicly exhibited in almost 250 years. It is one of a series of spectacular sales from the family collections of the Earls of Macclesfield.
The current, ninth Earl was forced to move out of the family home, Shirburn in Oxfordshire, five years ago as a result of a complex divided family inheritance, and a famous library and other works of art once held there have been appearing in the auction rooms. The Macclesfield Psalter, a stunning 14th-century illuminated manuscript, sold at Sotheby's for £1.7m, was saved from export after a public appeal and is now owned by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Sotheby's is also exhibiting a spectacular Titian, The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria, regarded as one of the best remaining in private hands, and the most important sold at auction in 20 years. It will be auctioned in New York next month – only the fifth time it has changed hands – with an estimate of up to $20m.
Many early visitors to the exhibition were stopped in their tracks by ostensibly more modest works of art on two small sheets of paper: a newly discovered drawing by Rubens and a postcard-sized drawing by Rembrandt only known from a 90-year-old photograph, which will also be sold in New York with estimates of up to $800,000 (£511,000) each.
The Rembrandt has been in a private collection and not seen by scholars for more than 50 years, while the Rubens, a lush Venus stooping to nurse her cupids, had vanished for centuries, only known from a later engraving. It resurfaced when the French owners took a blurry photograph to Sotheby's in Paris.
In London the drawings expert Greg Rubenstein got a phone call from a startled colleague, saying he was not allowed even to send a copy of the photograph, and that Rubenstein should hop on the Eurostar and come for a look – but warning that it might be a complete waste of time. The beautiful 1616 drawing in ink and chalk turned out to be well worth the journey, with a completely unguessed-at obsequious inscription in the artist's own handwriting to a wealthy patron in Antwerp, "noblest of men, greatest of senators, whose friendship increases daily".
The Rembrandt is a rare working drawing showing the young artist struggling with the composition for a major painting. He began work on Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver in 1628, aged 22, sketching directly on to the panel, but could not get the figures right and tried to sort out the lighting and the placing of the figures in the drawing. In the finished painting – a version of which is on loan to the National Gallery in London – the stooping figure of the priest has vanished again, visible only in x-ray under the surface layers of paint.
The drawing was known only from an ancient photograph, and has another stab at the subject by the artist on the back that has never been published. Rubenstein described it as "a wonderful thing, in which you can really feel the hand of the artist as he wrestles with this problem". It has been in a private British collection since the 1950s, and in a bank vault for the last 30 years when the family moved abroad to a hot climate which they knew would not suit the drawing.
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