Three objects, and what the research changed

Case one

Plate II

A Bruges Magdalene, traced to the record

The panel came out of an estate unsigned, with no understanding of who had painted it or what it was worth. It is a Magdalene, the saint identified by the gold-covered ointment jar with which she anointed Christ, in a transparent veil over a dark-red dress with hanging sleeves, set before dark-green curtains. That is the refined, jewel-toned manner of Ambrosius Benson, one of the most sought-after masters of the Bruges school.

Establishing the hand is the first half of the work. The second is proving it, and a sale at this level needs all of it: a chain of ownership, a place in the scholarship, and the physical evidence to match.

The attribution rests on the certification of Dr Max J. Friedländer, the pre-eminent authority on early Netherlandish painting, who recorded the panel in good condition. Its composition sits within a known group: it relates closely to the Magdalene in the Groeningemuseum, Bruges, which Friedländer listed as the first version of the type, and to another in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court. Placing a panel accurately within that lineage is what turns an attribution into a documented one.

The most persuasive evidence was the oldest. The picture had appeared in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs in 1938, among the “Notable Works of Art Now on the Market,” reproduced as Plate III, a published, datable anchor that fixed the panel in the literature nearly a century ago. From there the ownership history could be built forward: from the collection of Dudley Cutbill in London, through the David Koetser Gallery of New York and Zurich by 1946, and into a private collection in Rochester, New York, where it rested for decades.

Documented, published and certified, the panel sold on 25 September 2025 for $390,400, a result that reflected the hand of Benson and the confidence a complete provenance gives a buyer at this level.

Case two

Plate III

An unsigned Tiffany, proven by the hand

Better known for his glass, Louis Comfort Tiffany was also a serious painter, and this picture answers to his 1889 travels through Paris, Nuremberg and northern Italy. It carries no signature, only an old paper label, inscribed and titled, on the reverse.

An unsigned canvas proves nothing on its own. The work of the case was to establish, beyond argument, that this was a painting by Tiffany’s own hand, and then to show where it had been.

With no signature to rely on, the attribution had to be built rather than read. Assembled and set against the documentary record, the case was conclusive: the painting was formally and fully attributed to Louis Comfort Tiffany and confirmed as the work of his own hand. A study version of the same composition, held today by the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum, the principal repository of Tiffany material, corroborates it and places the picture securely within his documented output.

The exhibition history mattered more, and it had to be uncovered. The canvas was shown publicly within two years of its making: at the Society of American Artists’ Thirteenth Annual Exhibition in New York in 1891, and at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fourth Annual Exhibition that same year, as no. 335. A picture entered in two exhibition catalogues in 1891 is fixed in its own moment, by contemporaries, in print.

The ownership history supports it. It runs from the artist through the Tiffany House at Madison Avenue and East 72nd Street and, by repute, Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s celebrated Oyster Bay estate, to Henry MV Summers and Theodore V Summers of Oyster Bay, and by descent to Pittsford, New York. A line that begins inside the Tiffany household is about as close to the source as a Tiffany painting can be.

Fully attributed, corroborated by the Morse study version and documented in two 1891 exhibitions, the painting sold on 20 March 2024 for $60,000, in its original attributed frame.

Case three

Plate I

A pair of Houdon marbles, catalogued as copies

A pair of marble portrait busts came out of a private estate that had already been through an estate appraisal by one of New York’s leading international auction houses, which recorded them as copies and passed over them.

A record in the Frick Art Reference Library tied them to Jean-Antoine Houdon: signed portraits of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Comte de Buffon, shown at the Paris Salon of 1789 and praised there in a verse addressed to the sculptor. The ownership history came from a second archive entirely, the original purchase agreements, deposited at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library. Neither archive was indexed under Houdon, and neither would have been found by searching for the sculptor.

They are also small. At 11 3/8 inches these are reductions rather than life-size marbles, and their stature is a large part of why they were passed over. They were assumed to be copies rather than examined.

The pair sold for $1.475 million, and the rediscovery was reported by the international art and trade press.

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