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.
Sotheby’s held its December Old Master evening at New Bond Street on Wednesday 3 December 2025, a sale of 31 lots that made £30.7 million.
Rembrandt’s Saint John on Patmos was the name on the catalogue. Most recent Rembrandt scholarship had given the half-length Evangelist to a follower. After 14 months of research and technical analysis, 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 in the room for £6.8 million against an estimate of £5 million to £7 million.
One dealer called The Five Miracles of Christ the painting of the evening. The 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, and was sold to fund affordable housing. Two telephone bidders contested it, and it made £5.7 million. The buyer was a Christian charitable foundation, which 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. Twenty-three lots sold, and the total was up 27 per cent on the £24.2 million of the previous December.