Episode 15: Post-Sale Wrap with Emily and Aimee

While we can’t gossip about EVERYTHING we want to, we do cover a fair amount in this episode, a special post-sale discussion about the 13 April Photographs auction at Sotheby’s.

In this discussion we start out with a quick post-sale report for the recent auction of A Grand Vision: The David H. Arrington Collection of Ansel Adams Photographs. Together with the first tranche of prints we sold from David’s collection in 2020, the sales were an amazing success (over $11 million in sales) and evidence of Adams continued popularity and strength of the market for his photographic prints.

Emily picked this beautiful, rare albumen print by Thomas Eakins as her favorite. At $30-50,000 as a pre-sale estimate it gathered plenty of attention and had a lot of bidding activity during the auction itself.

Thomas Eakins, Untitled (Male Nudes Boxing), sold for $327,600

Aimee chose this work by Diane Arbus, Girl with a Cigar in Washington Square Park, N. Y. C. from 1965 as a favorite. It is a very early print made by the photographer. It sold for $60,480 against the pre-sale estimate of $30,000-50,000.

Diane Arbus, Girl with a Cigar in Washington Square Park, N. Y. C., 1965

As we discuss in the episode, of my favorite photographers, Steven Arnold, was also represented by a piece in the sale. While his work doesn’t have a huge market, I try to include them when I can. A great film came out not too long ago about Arnold and it is definitely worth a watch. Visit his archive’s website for more information.