The first tranche of 40 works raised £33.5m including premium at Sotheby’s London in October last year, making it the most lucrative single-owner sale of Orientalist art ever held.
A further 36 lots will now be offered in a stand-alone sale on March 31 with a combined estimate of £6.15m-9.16m.
Sotheby’s described the first sale as a ‘market-defining moment’ with no fewer than nine individual artist’s records posted.
The collection was formed in the early to mid-1980s, reportedly by Saudi billionaire Nasser Al-Rashid who engaged the help of Brian MacDermot, the founder of London dealership The Mathaf Gallery, to assemble the works. The collection eventually comprised over 150 views of north African, Ottoman and Middle Eastern subjects by mainly 19th century western artists such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, Gustav Bauernfeind and Ludwig Deutsch.
The upcoming sale includes Procession in Jaffa, an oil on canvas from 1890 by German painter Bauernfeind (1848-1904). It depicts a group of dervishes and Sufis leading a religious procession, possibly pilgrims embarking on the annual Hajj to Mecca.
Offered at auction for the first time in 40 years, it is estimated at £1.5m-2.5m and it follows the record £3.1m for the artist’s Market in Jaffa at Sotheby’s first part of the sale of the Najd collection.
‘Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert’ by Jean-Léon Gérôme, estimated at £700,000-1m at Sotheby’s.
Works on offer by Austrian artist Ludwig Deutsch (1855-1935) include The Palace Guard, an oil on panel from 1900 estimated at £600,000-800,000, and A Moment of Repose, an oil on panel from 1906 with the same estimate.
Another artist for whom a record was set at part one of the Najd collection sale was the French Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904) when Riders Crossing the Desert was knocked down at £2.6m.
On offer this time is Egyptian Recruits Crossing the Desert, an oil on canvas from 1857 estimated at £700,000-1m. One of the works exhibited at the Paris Salon at the height of his career, it depicts handcuffed prisoners led under guard across a sandstorm to their uncertain fate.
Claude Piening, Sotheby’s head of 19th century European paintings in London, said: “Last year when we exhibited all 155 works from the prestigious Najd Collection, we were thrilled to witness a resounding enthusiasm for Orientalist art, and so it is with great pleasure that we are able to offer a second tranche of luminous works by its most famous exponents.”
