During the January Old Masters sales, Sotheby’s dared to offer more expensive works than its archrival — a strategy that suited the decidedly cautious clientele that attended both houses’ auctions. All of the sessions suffered from the same long patches of no-bid buy-ins, but the response to Sotheby’s top lots proved that there is still serious money being spent on standout artworks with reasonable estimates.

Christie’s managed to sell only three lots at prices exceeding $1 million. Nevertheless, the house’s international department head, Nicholas Hall, says he "didn’t walk away from the week feeling the bottom had fallen through the market." After all, Christie’s started the week off with a bang on January 27, offering 68 works from the collection of Julius Held, the celebrated Rubens and Rembrandt scholar, who died in 2002. Several of these turned in stellar performances, among them Joachim Beuckelaer’s Market Scene (est. $200-300,000), a 1562 oil overflowing with game and vegetables that shot to $542,500, and Hendrik van der Borcht’s undated, loose-leaf-page-sized Collection of Ancient Objects (est. $30-50,000), which fetched $182,500.

Unimpeachable provenance, which drove the Held session to an impressive sell-through rate of 91 percent, continued to prove its mettle at the house’s Important Old Master Paintings sale the next day. Of the five aggressively estimated Turner watercolors from the estate of the late William and Eleanor Wood Prince — consignors in 2006 of Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio, which set the artist’s auction record of $35.8 million — four sold, with The Brunig Pass from Meringen, Switzerland, 1847-48 (est. $1.5-2.5 million), reaching $1,082,500. Other works from the Prince estate bounded past their estimates, such as the striking Portrait of Albertus Delantiere, Secretary to Navarre, 1471 (est. $30-50,000), attributed to the circle of Jean Fouquet Tours, which brought $206,500.

Private buyers from Britain cleaned up, reclaiming their patrimony. One nabbed John Constable’s 19th-century View of Salisbury (est. $500-800,000) for $1,082,500, and another snagged a dramatic nautical scene by Francis Holman (est. $50-70,000) for $30,000. "It’s going back to England," the Holman buyer says, beaming. Trade stalwarts, meanwhile, were as active as ever. The eagle-eyed Brussels and Paris dealer Georges de Jonckheere paid $134,500 for a picture of a man in a black coat (est. $70-100,000) that was recently reattributed to the 16th-century Master of the Andreas Hertwig Portrait. "The condition is perfect," says De Jonckheere.

The session’s only major drama occurred when the London dealer Jean-Luc Baroni bought the rare cover lot, Federico Barocci’s Head of Saint John the Evangelist, for what Hall lauds as the "pre-credit-crunch" sum of $1,762,500, triple the high estimate. Baroni insists that despite its unexpectedly steep price tag, the Barocci is a bargain, pointing out that "the condition is fantastic; it looks untouched."

While Baroni was bidding at Christie’s, his daughter was at the Sotheby’s Old Master Drawings session, outgunning a lone telephone bidder to snatch up Goya’s splendid 1812-20 Hunter with His Dog in a Landscape (est. $600-800,000) for $698,500. That was the top lot of the lackluster session, which suffered a grim buy-in rate of 48 percent.

The atmosphere the following day was considerably brighter, as Sotheby’s raked in $57,647,000 on 92 paintings. That total fell short of the session’s low estimate of $74,380,000, but two of the top lots made seven figures, including the highly anticipated Turner, The Temple of Jupiter Panellenius Restored (est. $12-16 million). The auctioneer, Henry Wyndham, caused guffaws in the tense salesroom by mistakenly opening the bidding for the undated oil at nine million pounds, but then a heated competition ensued between two bidders who drove the price up to $12,962,500. The consignor was the veteran New York dealer Richard Feigen, who says he was sad to let go of the painting, for which he paid £648,000 ($1.1 million) at Christie’s London in 1982.

Feigen also played a significant role in the competition for the cover lot, Hendrick Ter Brugghen’s Bagpipe Player in Profile (est. $4-6 million), which was restituted to the heirs of Herbert von Klemperer in July 2008. Four bidders followed the 1624 painting past $8 million, but in the end it was Feigen and the London dealer Johnny Van Haeften duking it out, with the latter landing the knockout punch of $10,162,500. The following week, the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., announced that it had acquired the masterpiece.

Any doubts that there’s a spark left in this market evaporated in the intense heat generated by two other pictures that incinerated their estimates: The Muse Erato, which François Boucher painted for Madame de Pompadour, brought $1,314,500 against a high estimate of $500,000; and Pierre Subleyras’s 1746 oil Portrait of Pope Benedict XIV (est. $100-150,000) went to the New York dealer Adam Williams for $986,500. George Wachter, the head of the Old Masters department at Sotheby’s, believes such results should boost confidence in the sector. "We sold 11 works for over $1 million," he says. "People believe in the value of these objects." "New York: Old Master Paintings" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.