A Diego Velázqeuz portrait of Isabel de Borbon, a Spanish queen, will head to auction this February at Sotheby’s, where it is expected to sell for around $35 million. Thought to have been painted in the 1620s, the work will appear in an Old Masters sale held in New York.
Sotheby’s said that the Isabel de Borbon portrait could be related to a famed Velázquez painting of her husband Philip IV held by the Prado in Madrid, and that this painting has been in the past displayed in prominent locations such as the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid and the Louvre in Paris.
In February, it will be offered with a financial guarantee. It is being sold from a private family trust, according to the Financial Times, and has been in the same family collection since 1978.
It left Spain during Napoleon’s 1808 invasion and later appeared in a French noble collection, according to Sotheby’s. It eventually passed through the hands of Henry Huth, a British banker and book collector. His relatives were the last to possess it until 1950.
High-quality works by Velázquez are seldom sold in public auctions, so the work’s appearance at the Sotheby’s sale is a rarity.
Generally, Velázquez’s paintings have sold for nowhere the estimate for this painting. At Sotheby’s London in 2007, his painting Saint Rufina achieved £8.4 million, just barely surpassing its £8 million high estimate; that painting continues to hold Velázquez’s record. In 1999, at Christie’s New York, that same painting had sold for $8.9 million, at the time minting a record for a Spanish Old Master. Meanwhile, in 2011, during a Bonhams London sale, the painting Portrait of a gentleman in a black tunic and white golilla collar fetched £2.95 million.