By Maria Bregman, writer and art critic
I was looking at the auction results from Versailles this weekend, and I had to wipe my glasses. Not because the numbers were dazzlingly high, but because they seemed, frankly, insulting.
A Peter Paul Rubens. The Peter Paul Rubens. The man who practically invented the Baroque, the painter of kings, the diplomat-artist whose brushstrokes define an entire century of European culture. A painting of his, lost for four hundred years, just sold for €2.3 million.
To put that into perspective, a decent terraced house in Fulham costs about that much. A parking space in Hong Kong has sold for more. And just the other day, we watched a Gustav Klimt go for over $230 million in New York.
So, what is going on? How does a “lost masterpiece” by one of the titans of art history sell for the price of a second-tier Banksy?
I’ve been turning this over in my head, and the answer isn’t just about the art market’s fickleness. It’s about us. It’s about what we can stomach hanging on our walls in 2025.
The Versailles Anomaly
First, let’s look at where this happened. Osenat. It’s a respectable auction house in Versailles, right in the shadow of the palace. It’s not Christie’s New York. There’s no global simulcast with slick video packages and telephone bidders screaming from yachts in the Mediterranean. It’s old school. Wooden gavels. Dust motes in the air.
Jean-Pierre Osenat, the auctioneer, sounded almost apologetic about the whole thing. He called it a “rare work,” sure. He talked about the talent involved. But he also admitted the quiet part out loud. The subject matter, he said, “limits the value.”
The painting is Christ on the Cross.
And there it is. The friction point.
We live in a secular, decorative age. The art market is driven by billionaires who want trophies. They want bright colours. They want pop culture references. They want things that look good behind a sofa in a glass-walled penthouse in Miami.
They do not want a graphic, emotional, muddy, four-hundred-year-old depiction of a dying man.
It’s an awkward truth, but religious art – specifically the heavy, suffering kind – is becoming a hard sell. It demands something from you. You can’t just glance at a Rubens crucifixion and go back to sipping your martini. It interrupts the room. It brings the mood down.
The Klimt that sold for hundreds of millions? It’s decorative. It’s gold. It’s about luxury and surface and sensuality. It’s easy to live with. A dying Christ by a Flemish master? That requires a specific kind of collector. A museum, maybe. Or someone with a very old, very dark library.
The Mystery of the Missing 400 Years
But let’s step back. The provenance here is the stuff of novels.
“Lost for 400 years.” Every time I hear that phrase, I get a twinge of skepticism. How do you lose a Rubens? It’s not a set of car keys. These things are usually catalogued, tracked, obsessed over.
Usually, when a “lost” master resurfaces, it’s been hiding in plain sight. Misattributed. Hanging in a corridor in a French chateau, dismissed as a “school of” or a “follower of.” Someone cleans off the varnish, looks at the brushwork, and realizes the energy is too good to be a copy.
The fact that this sold for €2.3 million – barely scraping past its lower estimate – suggests that the market still had some doubts. Or maybe just apathy.
Rubens ran a factory. We have to remember that. He was the Andy Warhol of the 17th century. He had a massive studio in Antwerp. He would do the faces and hands, and his assistants would do the robes and the backgrounds. “A Rubens” can mean anything from “he painted every inch of it” to “he walked past it and nodded while eating a sandwich.”
Osenat insists this is the real deal. A sketch, perhaps, or a smaller devotional work intended for private prayer. These intimate pieces are often where you see the artist’s hand most clearly. They aren’t the giant altar pieces meant to awe the illiterate masses; they are quiet, fast, energetic.
But the price suggests the big money stayed away.
The “Gritty” Reality of Old Masters
I remember walking through TEFAF in Maastricht a few years ago – the big fair for Old Masters. It felt like a nursing home for beautiful objects. The crowd was older. The air smelled of expensive cologne and anxiety.
The dealers there told me the same thing, over and over. “The kids don’t want brown furniture.” And by extension, they don’t want “brown art.”
Old Masters – Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck – are often dark. They are painted with bitumen and earth tones. They require lighting. They require care. They crack.
Contrast that with the contemporary market. It’s plastic. It’s neon. It’s instant.
This sale in Versailles feels like a tombstone for a certain kind of taste. There was a time when a Rubens was the ultimate status symbol. It said you were educated. It said you understood history, theology, and the grand tradition of European culture.
Now? A Rubens is an “investment risk.”
It makes me wonder about the buyer. Who are they? The auction house isn’t saying, obviously. “A narrow circle of collectors.”
I like the sound of that. It implies people who aren’t buying for the flip. You don’t buy a €2.3 million crucifixion to sell it next year for €5 million. You buy it because you actually want to look at it. Because you believe in it.
In a way, the low price is a badge of honour. It means the painting has escaped the speculation economy. It hasn’t become a poker chip like a Basquiat or a Koons. It has returned to being a piece of art.
The Genius of the Flesh
Let’s talk about Rubens for a second. Because amidst all this market chatter, we forget the guy could paint.
He was obsessed with the flesh. Not just naked bodies, but the actual substance of being human. The blood under the skin. The weight of muscle.
When he paints Christ, he doesn’t paint a symbol. He paints a man in agony. You can feel the gravity pulling at the arms. You can feel the lungs collapsing.
It’s visceral. It’s messy.
I think that’s another reason why the modern eye struggles with him. We like our images sanitized. We filter our photos. We airbrush our models. Rubens is high-definition reality, amplified to operatic levels. He is too much for us.
He was also a man of immense faith. Osenat mentioned that – that the artist put his “Catholic faith” into the work.
That’s a foreign language to the contemporary art world. We are comfortable with irony. We are comfortable with politics. But genuine, unironic religious devotion? That makes the art crowd shuffle their feet and check their phones. It’s embarrassing.
So, the painting sits there on the easel in Versailles, radiating this intense, centuries-old belief, and the room bids… €2.3 million.
The Klimt Contrast
I can’t help but go back to that Klimt comparison. Portrait of Fräulein Lieser. Sold in Hong Kong (not New York, actually, my mistake – it moved around, but the big money for Klimt is global).
Klimt is seductive. It’s gold leaf. It’s patterns. It’s erotic but in a safe, decorative way. It fits the aesthetic of the modern luxury lifestyle. It matches the handbag.
Rubens is the anti-Klimt. He is sweat and struggle.
It’s telling that we value the decorative surface a hundred times more than the emotional depth. It says everything about where we are culturally. We want art that flatters us, not art that confronts us.
A Victory for the True Believer
But here’s the twist. I actually think this is a good thing.
Hear me out.
If Rubens had sold for €200 million, he would have disappeared into a freeport in Geneva. He would be crated up, stored in a climate-controlled bunker, and used as collateral for a loan. He would be an asset class.
At €2.3 million, there is a chance – a slim chance, but a chance – that he has gone to a home. Or a small museum that couldn’t afford a Warhol.
There is a purity to this sale. The price was low enough that the person buying it must really, truly love it. They aren’t buying the hype, because there is no hype. They are buying the paint.
I remember digging through a box of vinyl records at a car boot sale once. I found a first pressing of something rare – I forget what, maybe Coltrane. It was dirt cheap because the cover was torn.
I bought it. I took it home. It played perfectly. The sound was warm and rich and real.
That’s what this Rubens sale feels like. It’s a scratchy, unfashionable record found in a dusty box. But when you put the needle down? The music is still there.
The Echo of the Auctioneer
Jean-Pierre Osenat said the bidding started at €500,000.
Half a million. For a Rubens.
That must have been a tense moment in the room. Imagine if it hadn’t climbed? Imagine if it had hammered down at the price of a used Ferrari?
It climbed to 2.3. Respectable, but modest.
It marks a shift. The Old Master market is contracting into a niche hobby for intellectuals and eccentrics. The “mainstream” money has moved on to digital art, to contemporary abstraction, to things that are easier to understand.
But trends are circular. We might be bored of brown furniture now, but give it twenty years. When the neon fades and the digital files corrupt, maybe we’ll crave the weight of history again.
Maybe we’ll look at our flat, screen-based lives and want something with texture. Something that bleeds.
Until then, whoever bought that painting got the bargain of the century. They bought a window into the soul of the 17th century for the price of a Jeff Koons balloon dog.
I know which one I’d rather look at when the lights go out.
Final Thoughts
It’s funny. We spend so much time talking about “disruption” in the arts. AI, NFTs, immersive experiences.
But the biggest disruption right now is simply time. Time is eroding the canon. Names that were once gods – Rubens, Velázquez, Titian – are slowly becoming ghosts. They are respected, but they aren’t loved. Not by the market, anyway.
This sale is a reminder that value is a construct. It’s a collective hallucination. We have decided that a gold portrait is worth a fortune and a dying god is worth peanuts.
That’s fine. That’s the market.
But standing outside the auction house in Versailles, looking at the palace that Rubens himself might have visited, you have to smile. The painting survived 400 years of being lost. It will survive the indifference of the 2025 art market.
It has nowhere else to go. It’s just waiting for us to catch up.
