During Asian Art Week in New York, from 17 March to 21 March 2015, some two thousand works of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Himalayan, Southeast Asian and European art from the collection of the late American scholar, dealer and connoisseur, Robert Hatfield Ellis (a.k.a. ‘The King of Ming’) were sold in a series of six auctions at Christie’s in New York for a staggering total of $131,660,188.
The headline evening sale of 57 ‘Masterworks’ on 17 March yielded $61,107,500, with four new world records set: for Huanghali furniture (Lot 41, four late Ming armchairs, sold to an Asian private buyer for $9,685,000); Nepalese sculpture (Lot 25, a 13th century gilt-bronze statue of Avalokitesvara, purchased by the Asian trade for $8,229,000); Tibetan sculpture (Lot 8, an 11th/12th century bronze figure of a seated yogi, bought by an Asian private collector for $4,869,000); and Indian bronze (Lot 26, a 9th century Chola period South Indian figure of Shiva Gangadhara Natajara, sold to a US private buyer for $2,853,000). The same price, while not a record for its class of object, was paid by the London dealer Eskenazi for lot 1, a tiny gilt bronze figure of a seated bear from the Western Han Dynasty (first or second century BC), which was the subject of much conversation.
lot 1,gilt bronze figure of a seated bear, Western Han Dynasty
The sole textile ‘masterwork’ in the evening sale was lot 51, a large, early 19th century Qing period silk and metal-thread ‘nine-dragon’ carpet, which was bought by an Asian private buyer for $341,000 against an estimate of just $30-50,000. This too must be a record for a Chinese silk carpet at auction, as the estimate was very much in line with the best prices recorded for this genre of (mostly late) 19th century silk and metal thread carpets with inscriptions indicating the Manchu palace for which they were made.The King of Ming’s two dozen or so other textiles and carpets included a number of good and some less memorable Chinese weavings, as well as a handful of inconsequential West Asian decorative rugs, all included in the fifth Ellsworth sale on 21 March. An Asian private buyer paid $93,750 against a high estimate of $50,000 for Lot 1135, minimally catalogued as a late 19th century Chinese carpet with an allover design of precious objects within a fretwork border.
