Estimated at 35 million | A royal portrait of Velazquez soon to be auctioned

(New York) A portrait of the Queen of Spain Isabella de Bourbon, produced in the 17th^e century by the Spanish master Diego Velazquez, will be sold at auction in New York in February, announced Sotheby’s, which estimates the work at $35 million.

In a press release Thursday, the large New York auction company of Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi announced that this two-meter-high canvas, featuring the daughter of the King of France Henry IV, would be exhibited to the public in London from 1^er to December 6 before being offered at auction in the American megacity on December 1^er February 2024.

“This exceptional painting is remarkable not only for its beauty and quality, but also for its size and its subject, royal portraits,” enthused George Wachter, responsible at Sotheby’s for paintings by the great European masters of the Renaissance.

“No other Velazquez painting of this size and importance has been on the market for over half a century,” he said.

Sotheby’s believes that this portrait Isabella of Bourbon, Queen of Spain could sell for “around $35 million,” a price “among the highest for old master paintings on the auction market.”

Created in the 1620s-1630s, during a period of “transformation in the career of Diego Velazquez” (1599-1660), the portrait represents Isabella de Bourbon – Elisabeth of France before her marriage to the King of Spain Philip IV – around age 20, “standing confidently in a dazzling black court dress […] at the height of her power, like a beloved and respected queen.”

She was the daughter of King Henry IV of France and his second wife Marie de Medici.

The work of the Spanish genius of Baroque painting, famous for Las Meninas (1656), was exhibited for decades in a royal palace in Madrid before landing at the Louvre in the early 19th century.^e century, then being sold to dealers and collectors until an auction in 1950 and being in the hands of their current owners since 1978, according to Sotheby’s.

This house and its competitor Christie’s, part of the Artémis portfolio company of French billionaire François Pinault, concluded their fall auction season in New York in mid-November, with a cumulative amount of two billion dollars in sales.