The Fiduciary Eye | Global art market report – April 2026

Welcome to the second edition of The Fiduciary Eye, a seasonal newsletter from Withers Art and Advisory giving you a unique perspective on the global fine-art market.

In writing The Fiduciary Eye, Mari-Claudia Jiménez and Frank Lord call upon their insider perspectives within the art world and decades-long experience in law and business to surface critical commercial and legal issues of interest to collectors and their fiduciaries.

In this issue, we review auction highlights from the first quarter of 2026, explore the forces at play in the Old Masters, London and Memorabilia markets, and consider the pluses and minuses of selling a major collection in one’s lifetime. 

Often a quiet affair, the sales this season featured a star-studded line-up that included exceptionally rare drawings by Michelangelo and Rembrandt and a spectacular painting by Canaletto. The Michelangelo, sold at Christie’s, provided the greatest drama of the season: a rediscovered study for the foot for a figure in the Sistine Chapel frescoes, it was so rare and unusual that the auction house specialists did not quite know how to price it. Estimated at $1.5-2 million, the tiny work (measuring just 5 ¼ x 4 5/8 inches) went for an astounding $27.2 million. Sotheby’s drawing of a lion by Rembrandt was sold by the famed Leiden Collection to benefit Panthera, the world's leading wild cat conservation charity (hence the selection of the subject matter); it brought $17.9 million against its $15-20 million estimate after relatively quiet bidding. The top lot of the $179 million sale series was Canaletto’s richly detailed painting of a Venice festival, which sold for $30.5 million, once again proving the 18^th-century master’s blue-chip status.  

Apart from these headline numbers, the most telling data point for the Old Masters sales was the 86% sell-through rate – some 15% higher than the average over the previous five years (see chart below). This points to a significant rise in interest across the category for artists who are far less famous than the three headliners. We have long championed Old Masters as an undervalued category, particularly in comparison with Contemporary art, whose market was overheated for many years and is now lagging in the overall recovery. For significantly less than $5 million, you can still find an important painting by an Old Master with centuries of history, while in the Contemporary market it isn’t unusual to pay much more for something with an unclear market trajectory that was painted in the past decade or two.  

Older collectors are still the dominant force in the Old Master market, but as the eminent (and generally elderly) dealers and other experts who dominated the field retire, a new generation of specialists is taking the stage. Both major auction houses are hoping to appeal to younger buyers by taking a fresh look at the genre and positioning their Millennial-generation specialists front and center. Christie’s Jonquil O’Reilly, for example, brings a novel approach by examining the intersection between Old Masters and fashion. At Sotheby’s, David Pollack has become the lead auctioneer for the Old Masters category in New York while Calvine Harvey, Head of International Strategy for Old Master Paintings appears in many promotional videos that bring a fresh perspective to the category. While there isn’t much available data on how many younger buyers are entering the Old Masters market, a walk-through of the auction previews indicated that a younger client demographic is definitely paying attention.

Hong Kong was the next stop on the international auction calendar: Christie’s and Sotheby’s held marquee sales of Modern and Contemporary the last week of March, and both houses posted their strongest results in four years, closing Q1 on a high note. The Hong Kong sales have evolved over the past decade to showcase a mix of blue-chip artists from Asia – especially perennial favorites Yayoi Kusama, Sanyu and Zao Wou-Ki – as well as the West. The top lot of the series, Joan Mitchell’s La Grande Vallée VII (1983), sold at Sotheby’s for HK$137.4 million (US$17.6 million), setting a new record in Asia for a work by a woman artist.

Christie’s top lot proved the global appeal of Gerhard Richter; the German artist’s Abstraktes Bild (1991), which likely was sent to Hong Kong because its deep red palette would appeal to Chinese tastes, went for HK$92.1 million (US$11.8 million). The sky-high sell-through rates – 92% at Christie’s and 97% at Sotheby’s – showed that supply is lagging far behind demand, and that should lead sellers back to the auction market in the months ahead.    

The takeaway? The art market can be counter intuitive. While collectors typically avoid thinking of art as an investment, it is undeniably an alternative store of value. Even in these uncertain times, fresh, quality artworks commanded confidence — and competition. The London and Hong Kong sales showed that even though financial markets wobbled, the appetite for masterpieces remains resilient.

This season Christie's made a headline-grabbing $27.2 million for Michelangelo's sketch of a foot. Michelangelo drawings rarely come to market, and the foot is a sketch for the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But its value is ultimately tied to the near-mythic status its maker has long held. Interestingly, a physical fragment from the early construction of his artistic reputation was simultaneously on offer uptown.

Among the drawings offered in the Collection of Diane A. Nixon, Sotheby's sold a sketch by Giorgio Vasari, who was an artist and author and a contemporary of Michelangelo. There is much to say about it, but here we're interested in its back, or verso, where there are lists of years and corresponding artists' names.  These are Vasari's notes — perhaps the only ones remaining — for the book that made him famous: the Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, more commonly called The Lives of the Artist.

Published first in 1550, while Michelangelo still lived, it is a compendium of artists' biographies wound around a story of the rebirth and growth of classicism. In Vasari's telling, the individual artists contributed to the gradual perfection of the visual arts. That perfection was reached, in his view, in Italy during his own life — in the work of Michelangelo.

It is difficult to fully grasp how influential Vasari's book has been.  The use of the French word "renaissance" (literally, "rebirth") to describe that entire era of Italian art comes directly from his narrative. The roots of the modern discipline of Art History are firmly planted in his text.  And the story that it tells culminates with Michelangelo.

That is how history leads us to a sketch of a foot selling for eight figures. And that makes the Vasari drawing feel like a steal at $108,000.

Agnes Gund, who died last year at age 87, was a revered philanthropist in the New York art world and one of its most esteemed collectors. Very little of her astounding collection is coming to auction following her passing because she donated or promised so much of it during her lifetime (MoMA was her greatest beneficiary) and famously sold some highly valuable art to benefit social justice causes. But there will almost certainly be stiff competition for three masterpieces from her estate that will be offered at Christie’s this May, led by a late Mark Rothko acquired directly from the artist.

At Sotheby’s, the collection of leading dealer Robert Mnuchin also features a magnificent Rothko from 1957 (Gund’s Rothko was painted a decade later) and will be offered along with a much earlier example.

This battle of the Rothkos – fought on three fronts, since the de Gunzburg auction also includes an impressive 1969 example by the Abstract Expressionist – raises the question of whether the market can absorb four major works by the same highly sought-after artist, all with impeccable provenance. It raises a blockage issue, much as we discussed in our last issue of The Fiduciary Eye, but in this case may have been unavoidable. We’ll look forward to finding out just how deep the market is for Rothko, an artist revered by many collectors from the Silent Generation but whose appeal may or may not be as strong for younger buyers. It’s a perfect test of the great taste transfer.