Going, Going, Gone,

and gone again, and nearly gone again for the third time!

we mentioned the up coming sale of a little seen painting by Vincent Van Gogh titled “Street scene in Montmartre (Impasse des Deux Frères and the Pepper Mill)” (1887), oil on canvas,  46.1 x 61.3 centimetres, image courtesy of Sotheby’s, on the 10th. March, and it sold, worst still I missed the auction, and an exciting one it was too, the painting was not sold once but twice, and the telephone cutting out before it could be sold a third time! it was estimated to go for €5m to €8m, which we posted here, but after the double sale finally went for €13m (with fees) at Sotheby’s in Paris on 25 March which broke a record for the artist in France, but here is the thing, the item was sold three times in less than an hour with three different price tags! The confusion cast a shadow over the auction and may even have attracted attention from French law enforcement authorities, it is too early to know if the magistrate in charge of the auctioneers' regulatory body will react, but French law is quite strict on the matter. When an auctioneer pronounces "adjugé", the sale is final. Furthermore, there can be no inequality of treatment between bidders. If a buyer defaults, the lot may be put up for auction again, but only with the formal agreement of the seller. And in the case that the final sale price is less than their bid, the defaulting buyer has to pay the difference, and there was a price difference between bidders, in this case Sotheby’s declined to comment on whether it will compensate the seller for the €2.75m price difference, for the full story of the painting that was sold twice, and nearly three times in the same auction, (damn telephone), have a look here.