A portrait of Lavinia Bingham, Countess Spencer, a direct ancestor of Princess Diana, is set to go under the hammer at a Monaco auction house this week, after spending decades in the hands of a British family settled in Monaco.
The painting, attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and estimated at between 100,000 and 200,000 euros, will be the centrepiece of Accademia Fina Art’s prestige sale on 19th March, with a public preview running until Wednesday.
Reynolds painted the Countess Spencer, wife of the 2nd Earl Spencer, around 1784. The work was engraved the following year and shown at London’s Royal Academy in 1878, then again at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883–84. After that, it largely disappeared from public view, passing through a succession of private hands before being rediscovered with a British family long based in Monaco.
The painting is the second of two versions Reynolds made of the same composition. The first has hung at Althorp House, the Spencer family seat in Northamptonshire, since the 19th century. The auction house describes the second version as the more accomplished of the two, suggesting Reynolds, having resolved the technical challenges in his first attempt, was freer to concentrate on finish and surface in the second.
The painting that got away…twice
When it came up for sale at Christie’s in May 1821, as part of the estate of Reynold’s nieces the Marchioness of Thomond, a family representative failed to bid in time and the painting was knocked down to a Mr Wansey for just £57.15.
Christie’s wrote to Wansey days later on behalf of the family if he would consider giving it back. He declined. By 1901 the painting had changes hands again, this time for £3,650. It now carries an estimate of up to 200,000 euros.
Scholarly records had noted the painting’s existence for over a century. It was listed in the 1899 Graves and Cronin catalogue of Reynolds’s work and again in David Mannings’s definitive 2000 catalogue, where it was described as a replica with variations and recorded as “untraced”.
The auction house says the paper trail behind the work, including the 1821 Christie’s correspondence, insurance documents from 1901, and a British government exemption inventory dated 1945, supports its provenance.
The auction sale also includes a panel painting attributed to Peter Paul Rubens, depicting the Penitent Magdalene and dated to around 1600, his Italian period, when he was closely studying Titian in Venice. It carries an estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 euros.
Other highlights include a lady’s cylinder desk attributed to the royal furniture supplier Jean-François Oeben, an English baroque cabinet in Japanese lacquer from around 1685, and a 1906 portrait by Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni, estimated at 200,000 to 400,000 euros.
The auction begins at 2:30pm on 19th March. Bidding is also available. by telephone and absence bid. Full catalogue details are available at accademiafineart.com.
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Main photo credit: Monaco Life