The hardcore group includes buyers like former coin dealer Barrie Winsor who at Sotheby's Australia's auction of Important Australian Art in Sydney on November 23, secured a John Peter Russell oil painting (lot 62) Belle Ile en Mer.
His purchase of the work in the room - when he could have been at a coin auction - for $258,000 was one of several very visible and reassuring in-person outlays by private collectors.
These helped Sotheby's Australia skirt the edge of the precipice over which many observers felt that the market and the industry which supports it, was about to fall.
Indeed a painting of strollers in long dresses on a cliff top painted in 1910 and entirely fresh to the market (it had not appeared for close to 100 years) sold without a tremor for $624,000 against estimates (which exclude buyers premium) of $400,000 - $600,000.
The painting, which was the sale's highlight, was The Cliff Path by Rupert Bunny (lot 20).It went to the telephone but there were at least two bidders in the room seriously chasing it.
A big win during the recent Melbourne racing carnivals by John Playfoot's horse Spectrolite led to suggestions that he might be back in the market for both the Bunny and the Russell both of which he had once helped underpin. But he was not sighted..
Ladies in long dress tend to return to fashion in hard times, along with flower pictures.
The latter was not entirely true this time In the lower reaches of the market. Mixed Flowers (lot 45) by Adrian Feint and An English Garden Bunch (lot 70) by Nora Heysen attracted strong bidding and sold for above estimates.
Even in the flower markets, however, buyers respected the prevailing selectivity and still lifes by Grace Cossington Smith and Elioth Gruner were passed in.
The sale of two Sidney Nolans and a very special Donald Friend were major contributors to a sales total including premium of $4,115,932,
They did not enable the hammer total of $3.4 million, however, to reach the lower estimate of $3.93 million and it was well short of. Sotheby's upper target of $5.36 million.
The result was also not spectacular in terms of the number of pictures sold, as 35 of the 95 (37 per cent of the total) still failed to find new homes.
But most of the higher value lots changed hands, albeit one, Rosalie Gascoigne's Bush Yellow, (lot 30) selling during the auction only after being passed in at $155,000.
A similar piece bright of "marquetry" by the artist was one of the major few failures at Deutscher and Hackett's sale a week earlier..
Such inclusions helped boost the Sotheby’s total sold by value to 105 per cent.
Given its part in one of Nolan's greatest series after Kelly, the Eliza Frase series, the sale of Nolan's Central Australian Escaped Convict, 1948, (lot 11), for $468,000 against estimates of $400,000 - $600,000, did not surprise so much as the enthusiasm for a drought painting by the same artist, Ram Caught in a Flood.
This (lot 53) sold for $300,000, the hammer price of $250,000 equalling its lower estimate.
The subject was hardly aimed at polite middle class drawing rooms, at least during dinners at which lamb was being served..
The last big price in the top five was institutional. The Queensland Art Gallery was on the phone for one (lot 44) of seven doors by Donald Friend which it secured for $264,000 against estimates of $220,000 to $280,000. On top of the hammer full GST was payable as it was consigned from the UK.
The gallery evidently was tempted by the door’s wall-power in buying the door which depicts Adam and Eve. It does not have anything equally striking by the artist.
The sale was well marketed with potential clients wooed assiduously and exceptional emotive cataloguing employed.
The 21 Klippels were reproduced almost larger than life and appeared especially so on the two big LCD screens on which they were pictured during the sale.
The Bunny price would have been particularly strong on a price on a square centimetre basis. At 65 x 81 cm it was not large for the artist but attracted a big price.
The ambulatory group depicted were painted side on and from the rear as in a badly taken photograph.
Yet Dr David Hansen in the catalogue essay provided food for many dinner party conversations to come by referring to the possibilities of what was going on within the picture:
"The trio on the right, caught under the arch of two parasols, convey a certain sexual tension, a possible story of divided affection and attendant jealousy," he wrote imaginatively.
Only seven of the Klippels, which were from the artist's family, found buyers because of ambitious pricing in the wake of the sale of the Bill Burge collection by Christie's in Sydney in 2006.
Triffid-like, a bronze No 1134; (lot 92) 21 x 21 x 21 cm typically struggled to make its lower hammer estimate of $25,000 at which went to the phone.
The market in small sculptures may have been temporarily exhausted by the miniatures shows which Sydney's Defiance Galleries holds every year. These exhibitions usually contain 100 or so works selling for less than $1000 each and many with entirely fresh ideas, against which Klippel can look repetitive and even obsessive..
Winsor was delighted with the sale pointing out that the Russell which he secured was acquired at the bottom end of estimates ($220,000 to $360,000 excluding premium).
It was the type of painting he had sold years ago to buy a house The coin market with which he had been so familiar has not been yielding such opportunities. .
Other collectors, not so readily button-holed and probably unaware of the lack lustre coin market, seemed to agree.
Only about 100 people attended the sale and there were lots of empty seats and few people standing in rooms in Double Bay, where it was once very difficult to get through the door.
This had been as if it was at the D and H sale. Half the normal number of chairs were put out and only half of these were filled.
But the room presence of real bidders showed the residual strength of a market under pressure.
Older collectors were encouraged by the inclusion of a greater proportion of more worthwhile traditional works although several of these were also left by the wayside.
Yet on a day when serious political and financial affairs were much in the news the art market held more than steady.
An exuberant Tim Goodman exclaimed embarrassingly "$4 million! There is a god" and he was not referring to the artist Godfrey Miller whose Figure Group (lot 48) made $42,000 against an estimate of $30,000 to $40,000 and who incidentally had been known to his students simply as "god."
Nor had he found religion. The result was better than Santa Claus, he said looking mightily relieved..
He was not about to take up cooking for money. His participation with art dealer Tim Olsen in a tentatively titled TV series Two men on a Vespa, was a diversion only. It was conceived, he said, as a sequel to the BBC TV cooking program. Two Fat Ladies, broadcast from 1996 to 1999 in which two women on bikes prepared food
Buying by dealer Denis Savill was in his usual area - Arthur Boyd - but he also competed for the Lawrence Daws of which there was a fine run of four. He gave an over-estimate $13,500 ($16,500) for lot 7, Coochin Pond, but let art consultant Vivienne Sharpe pay a solid $88,800 for another of his commodities, Ray Crooke, notably Islander Scene (lot 10).
Melbourne art consultant Mr Brian Kino put in a rare appearance at a Sydney sale but did not appear to raise his paddle. He explained that he was a consignor not a buyer.
Ex Goodman shareholder Mike Hale now living in the south of France also turned up to rooms in which, when trading as Goodmans, he had an equity, but bought nothing.
Recent promised donor of Old Masters to the Art Gallery of NSW, Ken Reed attended with a friend who bought a Friend. The friend paid a within estimate solid $67,200 for Friday Market (lot 47 )
