British Art Sales Fall With Stock Prices

LONDON—Demand for in the U.K. for both British Victorian era and 20th-century art has dropped as U.K. stock and real estate prices fall, Bloomberg reports. The slowed demand is reflected in two recent Sotheby's auctions, both of which failed to reach their low estimates.

Only 56 percent of 124 lots found buyers at Sotheby's July 15 auction of Victorian and Edwardian art. The sale brought in a total of £2.9 million ($5.8 million) with fees, less than half the pre-sale low estimate of £6 million. The same day, a Sotheby's morning sale of modern British art fetched only £6.4 million with fees against a low estimate of £7.5 million. Both of the sales, which rely largely on British buyers, brought in totals that were more 30 percent lower than the same Sotheby's auctions last year.

Among the works that failed to sell at the Victorian auction was James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot's La Cheminee (1870), which carried a pre-sale estimate of £1–1.5 million and sold at Christie's London in 2003 for £1.6 million. Sotheby's said a buyer purchased the work around its low estimate after the sale. The highest price paid at the modern art auction was £825,000 for a Henry Moore 1930s stone sculpture, Figure, which carried an estimate of £600–800,000. The work had previously been offered at Sotheby's Impressionist and modern sale in New York in May with an estimate of $2.5–3.5 million but didn't sell.

"People are frightened; they are nervous," said Rupert Maas, a London-based specialist in 19th-century British art. "They see the value of all their assets going south, and they can't see the point in increasing their possessions."