A lifetime later and in a land much further south, one of the portrait watercolors from this trip (Lot 62 ) vaulted to $105,000. Described as ‘An Ethnographic Study of a Northern Chinese Mother and Child’ claimed a hammer price of $90,000 ($104,850 incl. BP) against a pre-sale estimate of $10,000-20,000.
In a book titled ‘Around the Roof of the World’ the artist recorded that the Chinese believed a painter to be the ‘embodiment of a lettered person’, and that portraits cast incomparable spells over the people he encountered. Portraits are notoriously difficult to sell at auction, but the Davidson’s result is likely more a product of a different journey: both the Chinese and the Russians are on collecting missions to reclaim patrimony.
