Sotheby's summer Old Master evening made £37.7 million on New Bond Street, with a Rembrandt at £8 million and a record for Landseer's Scene in Braemar.
Sotheby’s held its summer Old Master paintings and sculpture evening at Sotheby’s on New Bond Street in Mayfair on Wednesday 1 July 2026. It followed a single-lot auction of the Hamilton Laocoön.
The bronze Laocoön, cast in Paris in 1817 by Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux, made £13.6 million. The evening sale then sold 35 of its 45 lots for £37.7 million, up 160 per cent on July 2025.
Rembrandt’s Let The Little Children Come Unto Me, a rare early history painting, led at £8 million. Sir Edwin Landseer’s Scene in Braemar, the sister painting to The Monarch of the Glen, set a record for the artist at £5.9 million.
Hans Memling’s The Virgin Mary Nursing the Christ Child made £3.5 million, also a record. Botticelli and an associate painted The Virgin and Child with the young Saint John the Baptist, one of only two known versions of the Madonna del Roseto. It made £2.5 million.
Eleven lots set new records, among them works by Bernard van Orley, Cosimo Rosselli, Palma il Vecchio and Giovanni Antonio Guardi. Ivan Aivazovsky’s Venice, San Giorgio Maggiore made £1.5 million against an estimate of £500,000 to £700,000.