Midway through its 10-day auction of art and antiques owned by the Royal House of Hanover in Germany, Sotheby’s has already doubled its pre-sale estimate of £9 million. Described as “a flea-market for the super rich”, the sale is being held at the family’s gothic revival castle, Marienburg, near Hanover, which was never inhabited, but was used to store the 20,000 items now on sale. The sale is of particular interest to Britain because many items were owned by the Hanoverian Kings of England. Prince Ernst August of Hanover, married to Princess Caroline of Monaco, is a cousin of the Queen’s. Before the sale, Prince Ernst’s younger brother, Prince Heinrich, protested that his brother “does not understand tradition. He wants to make a killing out of this to finance his life abroad”. Nonetheless, buyers queued up for the Old Master paintings on the first day. The highest-selling lot - an altarpiece by a follower of Lucas Cranach called Adoration of the Sheperds, estimated at £20,000 - sold to a Norwegian dealer for £150,000. Most of the silver bearing English royal crests and cyphers was bought by a private English collector. The top price so far is a record £443,000 paid by a UK dealer for a portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller of the ambassador from Tripoli to King George I.

Posted: 10|12|05 at 7:58 am. Filed under: UK News.