Sotheby's December Old Master evening made £30.7 million on New Bond Street, led by a reattributed Rembrandt and a late-medieval triptych from Sherborne.
A reattributed Rembrandt made £6.8 million at Sotheby’s in Mayfair on Wednesday 3 December 2025, at the house’s winter evening sale of Old Masters. The 31 lots made £30.7 million.
The picture was Saint John on Patmos. Most recent scholarship had given the half-length Evangelist to a follower.
After 14 months of research, George Gordon, the house’s co-chairman of Old Masters, reattributed it to Rembrandt and placed it in his 1661 cycle of Apostles and Evangelists. Some in the trade were sceptical. The London dealer Johnny van Haeften bought it against an estimate of £5 million to £7 million.
The Five Miracles of Christ, an eight-foot triptych of about 1480 by an unidentified Flemish artist, had been kept for centuries in the Almshouse of St John in Sherborne, Dorset. It was sold to fund affordable housing and made £5.7 million. The buyer, a Christian charitable foundation, plans to show it in the town.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Census at Bethlehem made £5.2 million. Hans Eworth’s 1562 portrait of the Duke of Norfolk sold for £3.2 million, a record for an Elizabethan portrait. The total was up 27 per cent on the previous December.