Holford Sales

The biggest crowd ever seen in Christie's auction rooms assembled last week for the first day of the auction of the late Sir George Lindsay Holford's collection. The throng included Dutch bidders eager to retrieve native masterpieces, English bidders eager to keep the best of the Holford collection in England, and American bidders, most powerful of all, who were only eager to buy the pictures and sell them for gain. When the sale began these rival groups sent prices up at the rate of $15,000 a minute. The first 60 paintings went for $1,800,000; Rembrandt's Man with a Cleft Chin, probably a portrait of his son, brought $200,000; his picture of a Man holding the Torah, $245,000.

When the second day's auction, far less extravagant than the first, had run up the total to $2,032,575, observers took note that the Holland bidders had won back but few of their native glories and that England's representatives had been able to keep only two pictures of primary importance--Rembrandt's Portrait of Maurice Huygens, and Francis Cotes' surprisingly fine Portrait of a Guardsman, which went to the National Gallery. The rest, with the exception of a few that French dealers netted, will probably reach the U. S.