The Lines of Vision auction at Christie’s in London, held to mark the twentieth anniversary of Stephen Ongpin Fine Art, totalled $3.32 million, or £2.51 million, with 92 per cent of the lots finding buyers. Of the works that sold, 41 per cent exceeded their high estimates. For a specialist sale of drawings and works on paper, those are strong numbers.
VIEW SCALE JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER, R.A. (1775-1851) The Lauerzersee with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythen, Switzerland Photo Courtesy Christie’s
The top lot was a 1970 Picasso, Le Peintre et son modèle, which sold for GBP 508,000, more than three times its low estimate. A Turner watercolour, The Lauerzersee with the Ruins of Schwanau and the Mythen, led the sale by estimate at £400,000-£600,000, achieving £482,600. Works by Tiepolo, Guercino and Boucher sold alongside Klee, Matisse and Frankenthaler. The catalogue’s range, from Old Master drawings to twentieth-century works on paper, is the point. It reflects what the gallery has been doing for two decades: treating drawings as a serious collecting field in their own right rather than as supplementary material to paintings.
Ongpin started at Colnaghi in 1986 and opened his own gallery in London in 2006. In the twenty years since, he has built a reputation grounded in scholarship and a particular kind of connoisseurship that the drawings market rewards. The approximately 100 lots in this sale spanned five centuries, with estimates ranging from £700 to £600,000, which gives some sense of how deliberately accessible the gallery’s programme is alongside its serious scholarly ambitions.
PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) Le Peintre et son modèle Photo Courtesy Christie’s
Ongpin has spoken about his attraction to works on paper in terms of directness. A drawing, he has said, is like standing next to the artist and looking over their shoulder as they work out ideas. Like a diary entry from another time and place, these works are often the beginning of a story. It is the kind of formulation that could sound like marketing but doesn’t, coming from someone who has spent his career building the case through catalogues of genuine academic rigour and exhibitions that take the medium seriously.
“A question I am often asked is why, when I started working as an art dealer, I decided to focus on drawings. I think it is because I have always been drawn (forgive the pun!) to the very intimacy of works on paper, and to the connection they engender with the creative process at its most direct and unfiltered. This is what I find so endlessly fascinating about this field. I have sometimes likened the study of drawings to standing next to the artist, looking over their shoulder as they work out ideas on paper. Like a diary entry from another time and place, these drawings are often the beginning of a story. I am delighted to have worked closely with Christie’s this summer to share some of that passion for drawings, and to introduce the work of the gallery to a wider audience and to a new generation of collectors.” – Stephen Ongpin
The sale was positioned within Christie’s Classic Week in London. The 92 per cent sell-through rate and the number of lots trading above high estimate suggest a collector base that arrived knowing what it wanted, which is usually a sign of a healthy specialist market rather than a speculative one. Drawings remain one of the more accessible entry points into serious collecting, both financially and intellectually, and sales like this one demonstrate that the field’s appetite is sustained.