“Gus”(Late Cretaceous, around 67 million years old)
Natural History including Gus Rex, Sotheby’s, New York, 14 July
Estimate: $20m-$30m
A lot with one of the highest auction estimates this summer isn’t a work of art—it’s a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton known as Gus. Uncovered on a ranch in Harding County, South Dakota, between 2021 and 2023, Gus’s $20m to $30m estimate is the highest ever assigned to a dinosaur. The fossils are big bucks for auction houses. In 2020, another Tyrannosaurus rex called Stan sold for $31.8m with fees at Christie’s, and in 2024 a Stegosaurus skeleton dubbed Apex brought in a record $44.6m at Sotheby’s. Even when the art market softened following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, prices for dinosaur fossils remained astronomical, high-profile and a boon for auction houses. Gus is a particularly impressive specimen, standing more than 12ft tall and 38ft long, with remarkably complete and well-preserved bones. Evidence of healed fractures and bite marks shed light on what life was like for Gus more than 60 million years ago.
Edwin Landseer, Scene in Braemar (1857)
© Angus Bremner
Edwin Landseer, Scene in Braemar (1857)
Old Master & 19th Century Paintings and Sculpture Evening Auction, Sotheby’s, London, 1 July
Estimate: £3m-£4m
A large-scale Highland landscape by Edwin Landseer will lead Sotheby’s Old Master and 19th-century evening sale in London this July with an estimate of £3m to £4m. Completed in 1857 and measuring nearly nine feet tall, Scene in Braemar is often discussed in relation to Landseer’s best-known painting, The Monarch of the Glen (1851), part of the collection of the Scottish National Gallery. The art historian Richard Ormond has described the painting as a “sequel” to that image, noting its more subdued atmosphere and darker hues. The painting was commissioned by the railroad contractor Edward Ladd Betts for his country home Preston Hall in Kent. It later entered the collections of industrialist Henry William Ferdinand Bolckow and Edward Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, remaining with the Guinness family until its last auction appearance in 1994. When the work was shown in an 1887 exhibition of the Bolckow collection, Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter singled it out as “one of the leading pictures” on display, according to Sotheby’s.
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty (1870s)
Courtesy of Modern Fine Art
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, The Statue of Liberty (1870s)
Modern Fine Art, Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Southampton, New York, 9-12 July
Price: $1m
Visitors to this year’s edition of the Hamptons Fine Art Fair will be met at the entrance by a familiar and timely figure: a ten-foot-tall bronze cast derived from Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s original plaster model for the Statue of Liberty, poignant as this summer marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Offered for $1m by New York gallery Modern Fine Art, the work is presented as the last example available on the market from a series of 12 artist’s proofs authorised by the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Bartholdi developed the monument during the 1870s, commissioned as a gift from France to celebrate the US Declaration of Independence’s centennial and the national abolition of slavery in 1865. The final version was dedicated in New York in 1886. The original plaster on which this bronze is based served as a key stage in the statue’s development, and later became the source for a small group of authorised bronze casts produced between 2010 and 2021. One cast has been designated a French National Treasure and is on loan to the French Embassy in Washington, DC.
Milton Avery, Rushing Stream (around 1930)
Courtesy of Christie’s
Milton Avery, Rushing Stream (around 1930)
First Open, Christie’s, New York, 17 July
Estimate: $40,000-$60,000
This intimate, moody landscape by Milton Avery comes from the Rabb Goldberg Collection, a multigenerational group of art built by one of Boston’s most prominent families. The collection was started by Sidney and Esther Rabb in the 1950s after the success of the family’s Stop & Shop supermarket chain, focusing on acquiring work by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists including Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Édouard Vuillard. Their daughter Carol Goldberg and her husband Avram, who served as president and chair of Stop & Shop, respectively, expanded the collection by adding post-war works by artists such as Louise Nevelson and David Hockney. Together, the collection developed into a survey spanning more than a century of artistic production. This Avery composition from around 1930 shows his mastery of colour, which influenced the following generation of American painters he encountered in New York in the 1930s and 40s, including Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb.
