Put it in your suitcase

Nicholas Penny

• Sotheby’s : Bidding for Class by Robert Lacey
  Little, Brown, 354 pp, £20.00, May 1998, ISBN 0 316 64447 1
• Sotheby’s : Inside Story by Peter Watson
  Bloomsbury, 325 pp, £7.99, May 1998, ISBN 0 7475 3808 5

Most great Old Master paintings have been sold several times at public auction over the last three centuries, many have been sold more frequently and only a few have escaped auction altogether, usually by passing through some other form of public sale or by changing hands privately. I thought this was common knowledge but in Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class Robert Lacey assures us that there had never been a ‘tradition of selling ... classic, museum-quality masterpieces at auction – at Christie’s or anywhere else’ before the end of the First World War, when Sotheby’s and Christie’s became rivals in auctioning Old Masters. His book is intended for those who watched the sale of the Windsors’ possessions on Channel 4 last year and much emphasis is placed on the novelty of selling the sherry glasses and cuff-links of celebrities – bits of the ‘brilliantly flawed lifetimes’, as he puts it, of the dreadful Duke and Duchess.