Christie's Old Masters Evening Sale made £38.9 million on King Street, with records for Lawrence's portrait of the Duke of Wellington and two van Huysum still lifes.
Christie’s Classic Week opened at Christie’s King Street in St James’s on Tuesday 30 June 2026 with the Old Masters Evening Sale, which made £38,940,700. Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington led the catalogue.
It came from the collection of the late Sir Robert Ogden, and Christie’s said the Duke counted it among the finest likenesses ever taken of him. It sold for £9,670,000, more than four times the record the same picture had set almost twenty years earlier.
Jan van Huysum, whom his contemporaries called the Phoenix of Flower Painters, had two still lifes in the sale. Each had last been offered more than twenty years before, and each broke his record. Fruit and flowers in a wicker basket made £6,516,000, and Flowers in a terracotta vase made £5,540,000.
The sale sold 35 of its 39 lots, 96 per cent by value. It set six auction records.
Rubens’s oil sketch of Aeneas helping Dido from her horse, from the Grosvenor Family Collection, made £2,734,000. John Melhuish Strudwick’s Pre-Raphaelite picture made £1,514,000, and Adriaen Coorte’s bowl of wild strawberries made £1,143,000.