Estimated at £600-1000, the large 3ft 5in x 5ft 11in (1.05 x 1.82m) oil in an Italianate painted frame was pursued to £5800 at Charterhouse Auctions (21% buyer’s premium) of Sherborne on July 27.
It had formed part of a small collection of Continental Old Master paintings offered in the same salerooms in April but had failed to find a buyer estimated at £4000-8000.
The group came from a Spanish client and had previously been in the collection of Jose-Maria Sanchez de Muniain y Gil, a professor of aesthetics at the Complutense Madrid University.
The paintings, which were purchased from dealers based in Madrid, hung at his weekend villa in the outskirts of the Spanish capital, a house affectionately known by locals as El Caracol (the snail), due to its unusually rounded construction.
