In what nowadays could be considered a a rare display of competitive bidding and a touch of excitement in the Old Master painting market, Nevill secured the small (45 by 38 cm) oil on panel for the National Gallery of Victoria for £3.6 million (including the buyers premium) which was just around the top estimate.
Sotheby's had estimated the work (without buyers premium) might make £2 million to £3 million. Equivalent to $A5.2 million, the price was the largest outlay on a single work in the gallery's history.
The director of the NGV Gerard Vaughan announced the acquisition yesterday. In keeping with the trend in collecting overseas, the price was established by funds generated in the hedge fund industry. Several of the world's leading art buyers are involved in this business..
The funds for the purchase were provided by Andrew Sisson, managing director and lead analyst with Balanced Equity Management. Sisson is a trustee of the gallery, writes our special correspondent.
Given that it is 40 years since a painting by Correggio has surfaced at auction, the price was naturally a record. The painting has been in Switzerland for many years and has only just been recognised as the work of the master.
The purchase reinstates the gallery as the one art museum in Australia seriously collecting Old Masters.
It will be an especially welcome foray into the international market given that the Felton Bequest, which has been the main source of funds over many years for works by the dead, appeared to recently vacate it...albeit for a good cause...and will surely be back.
The Felton spent much of the $6 million it had on hand for this year's 150th anniversary of the gallery's founding for contemporary Aborigonal art.
Correggio is considered one of the key artists whose work defines the High Renaissance.
The oil on panel painted around 1514 to 1515 is "an incomparable masterpice with no other similar work in the NGV collection, or any other public collection in Australia," says Vaughan.
Correggio was a master of illusionism who served the church, producing some of his best work for the Parma Cathedral. He also worked for private clients where he also demonstrated an unabashed eroticism.
The virtues of the present work are not fully apparent as the work requires conservation, to which it shortly will be headed.
The director of London's National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, described the painting as "enchanting" and it is clearly in remarkabble condition "even though many of its beauties are still concealed by darkened varnish."
Nevill has links with the art loving Australian business world going back to the 1980s through Alan Bond and 1990s John Schaeffer.
She is is a director of Nevill Keating McIlroy which is a London art dealership run in partnership with former Christie's Australia managing director Roger McIlroy.
The partnership established a new high for a work of Australian interest when it sold John Webber's Portrait of Captain Cook to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra in 2000 for $5.5 million.
