This past week, international auction house, Christie's, sold art worth £135 million (slightly under $214 million), topping the high estimate of £127.1 million as the London art world entered a two-week period of auctions. Among the lots put up on sale was the art collection of a very glamorous personality — Elizabeth Taylor.

On February 7, 2012, Christie’s London day and evening auctions of impressionist and modern art included 38 works from the Elizabeth Taylor collection. The day session included three very important works by Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, which had been prominently featured in a global tour of the highlights from the collection of Elizabeth Taylor, displayed in New York and London last autumn. The combined total of the sales of these first three works was £13.79 million, more than doubling their pre-sale estimate of £6.2 million. It is pertinent to mention that Taylor, besides being the most important film star of her time, was also an art lover and connoisseur of no mean order. One might even say that she was brought up on art. As the daughter of art dealer Francis Taylor, who ran a successful art gallery on London’s Old Bond Street, her love of fine art began at home as a child and continued when the family moved to Hollywood. As an adult, she became a keen admirer of impressionist and modern art in particular and is said to have had an “acute grasp of 19th and 20th century British and French paintings.”

At the Christie sale, Van Gogh’s Vue de l’asile et de la Chappelle de Saint-Rémy — fetched the top price of the group at £10.1 million. Bidding is said to have opened at £3 million and “immediately pursued by multiple clients in the room and on phone and sold after four minutes of competitive bidding to an anonymous client on the phone.” The painting is a landscape in hues of early autumn, it is said to be “a view of the asylum where Van Gogh spent his last months.” Purchased by her father Francis Taylor on her behalf, at an auction in 1963 for £92,000, the painting was hung in her living room at Bel Air, California, till her death in March 2011.

The self-portrait by Edgar Degas, who is best known for his studies of ballet dancers and horses, was sold for £713,250, while a large-scale landscape titled Pommiers à Éragny, by Camille Pissarro, was sold for £2,953,250.

An additional 35 works from the film star’s fine art collection were offered for sale on the evening of February 7 as part of Christie’s continuing sales series of impressionist and modern art. This lot included works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Maurice Utrillo, and Kees Van Dongen and a selection of modern British paintings by Augustus John that Elizabeth Taylor inherited from her father. While sale prices were not available, it was stated that all the works managed to find buyers.

As a footnote, we might add that Elizabeth Taylor was above all a personality who lived life on her own terms —where everything was larger than life! Last December, Christie’s had auctioned many of her personal items such as her famous jewellery and furniture for more than £34 million. In the case of her art collection, Marc Porter, Chairman Christie’s in US says, “The exceptional results for these three masterpieces by Van Gogh, Degas and Pissarro are further evidence of Elizabeth Taylor’s skill and sophistication as a collector.”

(The writer is a winner of many advertisingdesign awards and apainter of repute)