Five years ago Bonhams had put an estimate on the Club's sculpture of a £100,000-150,000 (then equal to $A240,000 to $A360,000) so the value of what many members considered a club mascot has since more than doubled
Christie's appears to have been surprised themselves by the price achieved on its offering as its estimate, an upped £250,000 to £360,000 was still comfortably exceeded.
Given the troubles the contemporary Aboriginal art market has gone through over the same period, the club could easily have lost any funds saved as one of the major proposals at the time was to plough the money raised by the sale into contemporary Aboriginal artists.
The satisfaction of doing something positive for indigenous art would still have been at the cost of also losing future art donations as donors do not like to give works which are going to be sold off.
The work was given to the club over a century ago by one of its members.
Its retention within Australia also means that Australia has a bronze version of what would now require enhanced export approval should any future effort be made to export it for sale overseas.
It is one of the High Victorian artist's chefs d'ouevre with an historical Australian association that made it a very special portable heritage item.
The record setting version belonged to Sydney businessman Mr John Schaeffer who has a distinguished record for the relentless pursuit of Olympian and Pre-Raphaelite Victoria art. His promised gift of a marble version of the same work to the Art Gallery of NSW where it is on display means the striking image will remain familiar to Australians. The price was a record for the sculptor.
Mr Schaeffer, who downsized his collection when shares in his Tempo Services cleaning group took a nosedive in the mid noughties, told the Australian Art Sales Digest's writer Terry Ingram that he was a net buyer of lots at Christie's latest sale but he declined to elaborate. He stopped even thinking of his favoured lot, Edward Burne-Jones, Love Among the Ruins, when the bidding reached the lower estimate of £3 million.
Love Among the Ruins, a large scale watercolour, of which Mr Schaeffer had an engraving, is reported to have attracted bids from Russia, Asia and the Middle East. It went to the London dealer Guy Morrison, bidding on behalf on an anonymous client, for a stunning £14.8 million, a particularly large sum given that the work being a watercolour, it can only be exposed to the light for a fraction of the year.
When the Union Club as it was then known was considering the proposal, from a Sydney art consultant, to sell its version of the Athlete, it could scarcely have been foreseen that successes in British sport, from securing the Ashes to tennis triumphs, would have suddenly given the nation a new surge of pride.
While there were no heats for athletes wrestling with pythons at the Olympics, market observers are speculating on a connection between the recent prowess shown by the British in many sports. British art had been a very quiet market for four or five years.
Thanks to the Burne-Jones and the Leighton, the latest sale came out at a respectable £22.2 million and 93 per cent total by value. Sales by lot were a less impressive 58 per cent.
Australian public and presumably private collections have relatively strong holdings of British Victorian and 20th century art.
One of the largest offerings at the Christie's sale was sculpture by Elizabeth Frink. These did not do so well because of the numbers on offer. In the 1970s Robert Haines as director of the David Jones Art Gallery promoted her work here.
