“She really digs the Frans Hals,” her husband, Mike Todd, told reporters at the time
(CBS/AP) Elizabeth Taylor’s collectibles continue to rake in a lot of cash. A 17th-century portrait that once hung in the living room of Taylor’s Bel Air home sold at auction Wednesday for $2 million — a lot more than its presale estimate of $700,000 to $1 million.
“Portrait of a Man,” painted in the early 1630s, was only recently reattributed to Dutch master Frans Hals.
After Taylor hung it in her California home in the 1950s, “It academically fell off the radar,” said Nicholas Hall, head of Christie’s Old Master paintings.
But last summer, Christie’s and Pieter Biesboer, the retired curator of Old Master paintings at the Frans Hals Museum in Holland, confirmed the work was by Hals.
Depicting a gentleman in a black coat and white collar with his hands folded, the painting is signed “FH.”
Taylor’s art dealer father, Francis Taylor, acquired it and gave it to her in the 1950s. She hung it over her fireplace near an iconic lithograph portrait of herself by Andy Warhol that sold at Christie’s in December for $662,500.
“Portrait of a Man” was the only Old Master she owned. She was very fond of it. In 1956, while recuperating from back surgery at New York Presbyterian Medical Center, she had her hospital room decorated with “Portrait of a Man” and several other paintings, 카지노사이트 including a Renoir and Monet.
“She really digs the Frans Hals,” her husband, Mike Todd, told reporters at the time.
The Frans Hals portrait went to a buyer bidding by phone at Christie’s sale of Old Masters. Other paintings from the late actresses’ collection will be sold by Christie’s in London on Feb. 7-8.
In December, the auction house sold her collection of jewelry, fashion and memorabilia.
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