Bucolic Van Gogh riverscape with royal connections set to become the artist’s most expensive Paris work

Christie’s is to auction a Van Gogh painting from a royal collection in Hong Kong on 26 September. It will become the most expensive work from Van Gogh’s Paris period and one of the most important works of Western art to go under the hammer in Asia. The estimate for the riverscape is HK$230m-380m (US$30m-50m). A guarantee has been offered, so the work will sell.

Moored Boats (Les canots amarrés) (July 1887) is being sold by “a family trust represented by the royal family of Bourbon-Two Sicilies and Mr Patrick L. Abraham”. We can report that the seller is effectively Princess Camilla, of the Bourbon-Two Sicilies family. Abraham is a trustee and family friend. Christie’s specialist Adrien Meyer describes the Van Gogh as “one of the gems in the crown of the Bourbon collection”.

The Bourbons are descendants of the monarchs who ruled the island of Sicily and southern Italy from 1734 to 1860. The lost throne is now claimed by two branches of the family, including one headed by Prince Carlos. It is his wife, Princess Camilla, who is the owner of the Van Gogh through a family trust.

The princess lives between Rome, Monte Carlo and Paris. Along with her role as a socialite and philanthropist, her business interests include companies involved in defence and security. She is also a senior figure in the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, a dynastic order of knighthood.

Princess Camilla is the daughter of the controversial Italian billionaire Camillo Crociani, who died in 1980, and his actor wife Edoarda. It was Edoarda who is believed to have purchased Moored Boats, at a Sotheby’s auction in 1991, after her husband’s death. She had earlier acquired a Tahitian Gauguin, Hina Maruru (1893), which is just as valuable as the Van Gogh.

Moored Boats is probably the first Van Gogh to be owned by a European royal. Royals now tend to own Old Masters, or occasionally contemporary art, and Van Gogh has hardly been within their sights.

Van Gogh painted Moored Boats at Asnières in the north-west outskirts of Paris. His view is from just beyond the railway bridge, on the north bank of the Seine, facing east. The tall trees at the far right of the composition are on the tip of the Ile de la Grande Jatte. Although Van Gogh’s scene looks bucolic, both sides of the river were then being built up with housing and industry at the time.

Van Gogh regarded Moored Boats as part of a triptych, to be displayed with two other Asnières scenes. He envisaged displaying on the left a painting with the railway bridge (which was just behind him when he worked on Moored Boats), with a similar line of boats. In the centre would be a depiction of the Restaurant de la Sirène, which was on the quai, again just behind him.

Moored Boats has an interesting Scottish provenance. After passing through a Paris dealer in 1912 it went to the London-based Independent Gallery, which lent it the following year to the UK’s Post-Impressionist and Futurist exhibition. By 1921 the painting had been bought by the Dundee grocery owner John Tattersall.

In 1933 the Van Gogh was acquired (via the dealer/collector Matthew Justice) by the Aberdeen greetings card publisher Royan Middleton, whose descendants sold it in 1991. Moored Boats was last exhibited in a show on British collectors of Van Gogh held at Compton Verney gallery near Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and the National Gallery of Scotland in 2006 (I was the curator).

The Van Gogh is now being sold by Christie’s in Hong Kong. This comes as no surprise, since The Art Newspaper has recorded that half of Van Gogh’s most expensive paintings have sold to Chinese collectors in recent years. These include Young Man with a Cornflower (June 1890), which was estimated at $5m-$7m, but soared to an astonishing $47m at Christie’s in 2021. Meyer says that “Van Gogh is now the artist with the greatest resonance in Asia, along with Monet”.

Moored Boats has not been shown, even briefly, by Christie’s in London or New York, which emphasises the current dominance of the Asian market. Earlier this week it was presented in Beijing and it will then go on to Christie’s premises in Shanghai (7-8 September), before heading for Hong Kong, where it will be in the inaugural sale at the auction house’s new Asia Pacific headquarters, The Henderson.

The previous record for a Paris period Van Gogh was Corner of a Garden with Butterflies (May-July 1887), which sold at Christie’s New York in May for $33m. In 2021, Sotheby’s became the first auction house to offer Van Gogh’s work in Hong Kong, selling Still Life: Vase With Gladioli, which went for HK$71m (US$9m). Moored Boats may also end up setting a record price for a Western artwork sold in Asia, if it exceeds Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Warrior (1982), which sold at Christie’s in 2021 for HK$280m (or $42m at the time).

Other Van Gogh news

• The National Gallery’s much-heralded blockbuster Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers opens next week (14 September-19 January 2025).

• Two of my books are being reissued in a smaller paperback format, The Sunflowers are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece (2013) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (2021). The publication date is 17 October, although copies will be exclusively available at the National Gallery from 14 September. I will be speaking on 7 October at the Cheltenham Literarature Festival.