Sentence examples for master sales from inspiring English sources

A masterpiece by El Greco sold at Sotheby's yesterday evening (July 3 , 2013 for £9.1 million, a record for a Spanish Old Master and the highest price achieved at London's Old Master sales this week, according to the auction house.

You will need to master sales, marketing, advertising and digital strategies – in short, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.

This latest round of old master sales in London did not seem to include that many obvious bar-raisers.

"Many of our European clients felt it was very inconvenient to have old master sales at a completely different time from Sotheby's," he said.

Ian Kennedy, who heads Old Master sales at Christie's in New York, said the Rembrandt Research Project of Amsterdam included this painting in Volume I of the corpus of the artist's works in 1982.

Tucked away in obscure buildings from Manhattan to Maastricht, in the Netherlands, art restorers have spent the last six weeks quietly racing the clock in the annual art world ritual that begins in late January with the old master sales in New York and peaks today in Maastricht with the opening of the International Fine Art Fair.

In January 2000 the painting was on the cover of the catalog for Sotheby's old master sale in New York, where it brought $8.2 million.

OLD MASTER SALE AT SOTHEBY'S Charles Forte, the founder of the global chain of hotels and restaurants known as Trusthouse Forte, also had a passion for paintings, even if his collection of old masters and British painters didn't quite rival the Earl of Iveagh's.

The challenge will be to persuade sellers who don't need to sell to continue consigning their very best works.Just how difficult this will be can be seen from the fact that when asked about the coming sales, both houses ignore the Old-Master sales that will be held in New York at the end of January and focus instead on the Impressionist and modern sales the following month.

And unlike the markets for Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art, old masters sales are traditionally dominated by dealers.

Yet what is on offer at the December Old Masters sales at Christie's and Sotheby's, including one of Joseph Wright of Derby's best-known works, An Academy by Lamplight, is breathtaking and, in context, extraordinarily cheap.