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Master Paintings & Works of Art Part I

Live Auction: 5 February 2026 • 10:30 AM EST • New York

By Keith Christiansen

In his New York Times obituary, Stanley Moss was remembered as, “a lyrical American poet who for seven decades evoked a troubled world of sorrows and sensual pleasures ruled by a silent God seemingly indifferent to the fate of humanity." I don’t think Stanley would have objected to that description. Poetry was his passion, his means of expression. But his love of art and his activity as a dealer—the means of financing his poetry and the running of the Sheep Meadow Press—was no less passionate. According to his own account, the two were intertwined. In a 2005 interview with Dilan Foley for the blog The Last Bohemians, Stanley recalled his beginnings as a dealer. “I went to Europe. A girlfriend of mine had painted two paintings of me and I sold them, which paid for the trip. I came back, working my way over on a boat. I thought, what job would I like to have most? I thought, I’d like to work at [the publishing house] New Directions. New Directions owner, James Laughlin, gave me a job as an editor and glorified office boy. It was 1949 and I was 24.” He then went on to say, “When I started selling art, I had no money or training. I have a gift for finding Old Masters. I have discovered pictures that now hang in the Louvre that I bought for nothing. It takes taste and brains... How do I balance my careers as a poet and a dealer? I have the advantage of not having to sleep much."

When I met Stanley, almost three decades later, he was established as both a poet and a dealer, known for handling paintings that had belonged to Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi. Together with his wife Vittoria and with the advice of the great Italian critic Roberto Longhi, Contini had transformed himself from a stamp expert to one of the foremost dealers of Renaissance art. It was through his most acquisitive client, Samuel H. Kress, that 236 works of art ranging from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century entered the National Gallery of Art; still others were donated to the Italian State in 1969 and are exhibited in special galleries in the Galleria degli Uffizi. During the time that he taught English in Barcelona and Rome in the 1960s, Stanley had befriended the heirs of Contini-Bonacossi and the remnants of this prestigious collection passed into his possession—including the Bellini and Workshop Woman at her Toilette Holding a Mirror (lot 26) and the striking Tintoretto ceiling of the Allegory of Music (lot 24)that are in this sale. So also was the picture that occasioned my first visit. Now in the Musée du Louvre: a modest-sized, bust-length portrait of the celebrated condottiero Sigismondo Malatesta by Piero della Francesca. Stanley was then living on the Upper West Side, in one of the towers of the San Remo, with a commanding view over Central Park. Only months before, I had moved to New York to assume the position of assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Stanley, ever assiduous in expanding his circle of friends and potential clients, invited me to come see the picture. I can still remember sitting on a windowsill in the living room so as to profit from the natural light playing across the surface of this marvelous painting. I knew that its attribution was not universally accepted, but it had the endorsement of Roberto Longhi, whose 1927 monograph established the critical basis for our modern appreciation of the artist, and it had recently been cleaned. I found it completely compelling. So, I was to learn, did Michel Laclotte, the head of the department of paintings at the Louvre, which acquired the picture the following year.

I cannot remember when Stanley moved into the beautiful house in Riverdale with its handsome porch overlooking the Hudson, but it was there that, over the years, I visited him to see the latest acquisitions and enjoy his signature Bouillabaisse. He cut an impressive figure, further enhanced by the large labrador retriever that forced himself on visitors; his strong featured face projected a seriousness that was reflected in the pictures that hung on the walls. There were paintings by El Greco and Goya (Stanley was a hispanophile) but also works by lesser known artists—his “discoveries.” Take, as an example, the exquisitely painted and hauntingly moving painting of the Crucifixion by the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Pieter de Kempeneer, known during his activity in Spain as Pedro de Campaña. Little known outside of scholarly circles, Campaña is nonetheless an artist of wonderful talent and originality. Like the Piero portrait, the Crucifixion was acquired by the Louvre in 1986.

Stanley’s combined passions for poetry and painting—a pairing that would have seemed natural to humanist writers in the Renaissance—lay behind his project to make accessible to an English-speaking audience the achievement of the greatest critic of Italian painting of the twentieth century, Roberto Longhi. Longhi’s style of writing is unique in its ability to convey in words the visual terms of an artist. But its inventive language and complex syntax pose significant challenges even for native speakers. Sometime in the early 1990s, Stanley asked me which of Longhi’s essays I would choose for a translation. The result was Three Studies, which appeared in 1995. Pleased with the result, he decided to take on an even more ambitious task: the translation of Longhi’s landmark monograph on Piero della Francesca. Stanley managed to locate a talented translator, David Tabbat, who was able to confront the eloquent but idiosyncratic descriptions that made Longhi’s monograph such a literary landmark. These were not projects conceived to turn a profit. Quite the contrary.

It must have been about fourteen years later that I received a phone call from Stanley proposing a promised gift to the Metropolitan Museum. At an auction in London in 1995 he had purchased a fascinating still life depicting a bird pecking at a bowl of grapes set on a wood shelf. The sale catalogue called the picture North Italian School and dated it to the seventeenth century. However, its appearance was distinctly more primitive than might be expected from a work of that date and Stanley clearly thought it was something worth acquiring. Following its purchase, he got in touch with the great Italian connoisseur, Federico Zeri, who wrote to him suggesting that the picture, the composition of which has much in common with examples of fifteenth-century inlaid wood panels, intarsia, was the unique survival by the first European artist specifically lauded by contemporaries as a painter of still lifes: Antonio da Crevalcore (active between 1443 and 1525). When I was first shown the picture, I found the idea intriguing and took the step of confirming the attribution with both Zeri and the leading scholar of Bolognese painting, Daniele Benati, who then published it. I’m confident that Stanley liked the way the composition was intentionally conceived so as to emulate a painting of the fourth century B.C. recorded by one of our primary sources on ancient art, Pliny the Elder. Painted by Zeuxis, the favorite painter of Alexander the Great, as part of a competition, the picture famously depicted grapes so realistically that birds came to peck at them. Crevalcore includes a bird in his picture and also introduces further trompe l’oeil details so as to position himself as the successor of the ancient master. This overlapping of cultures, suggesting a collapse of time as well as an assertion of ambition, gives the picture a particular resonance that seems to me a fitting tribute to Stanley’s utterly original, contradictory, and persistently inquiring mind as well as his conjoined passions, evident as well in the paintings in Master Paintings & Works of Art Part I and Master Paintings & Sculpture From Four Millennia Part II.

For Property from the Estate of Stanley Moss in Part II, please click here.

Dr. Hinrich Bischoff was an exceptionally discerning and energetic art collector, renowned for his sharp eye, formidable memory, and enthusiasm for the art market. His collecting focused primarily on Dutch seventeenth-century and Flemish sixteenth-century painting, with a smaller but significant interest in Early Netherlandish works. Later in his life, he expanded his scope to include French eighteenth-century painting. Regularly attending TEFAF Maastricht, his presence was well known among Old Master dealers, reflecting both his seriousness as a collector and his enjoyment of the competitive dynamics of the art trade. He developed particular affinities for artists such as Lucas van Valckenborch, Gillis Mostaert, Philips Wouwerman, Gottfried Schalcken, and Adriaen van der Werff, among others.

Bischoff maintained close relationships with leading museum curators and was an active lender to major institutions, including the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel and Berlin. Works from his collection were exhibited publicly for many years, underscoring both their quality and scholarly importance. While he sold notable paintings during his lifetime and others were dispersed after his death, the works included in Master Paintings & Works of Art Part I and Master Paintings and Sculpture from Four Millennia Part II represent a final testament to the depth, coherence, and passion that defined his collecting.

Anton Frederik Philips, co-founder of Royal Philips Electronics, known universally as Philips, was an ambitious collector whose activities after the First World War resulted in one of the most significant private collections in the Netherlands. Active throughout the 1920s and 1930s, his collection was wide-ranging and encyclopedic, encompassing European and Chinese porcelain and bronzes, objects of vertu, silver, illuminated manuscripts, books, and a substantial group of paintings and prints. At its core was an exceptional assembly of Old Masters alongside Dutch nineteenth- and twentieth-century works.

Philips acquired works by many of the most important artists in the Western canon, including Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Aelbert Cuyp, Jan Steen, Rubens, Van Dyck, Brueghel, Bellini, Cranach, Holbein, and others. He collected with a strong emphasis on quality, making acquisitions primarily in Amsterdam and during focused buying trips to Paris and London, where he worked closely with leading dealers such as Captain Robert Langton-Douglas. Although now largely dispersed, his collection was distinguished by its breadth, connoisseurship, and underlying sense of moral and aesthetic value, reflecting a deeply principled approach to collecting.

For Property from the Collection of Anton Philips in Part II, please click here.

Anne and John Lowenthal were exemplary private collectors who assembled a highly refined collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings, largely formed in the 1970s and earlier, characterized by close living with the works and a rigorous commitment to quality. Their acquisitions included paintings by artists of the highest caliber, such as Frans Hals and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, later entering major collections including the Leiden Collection and the Collection of Prince Liechtenstein. Following John Lowenthal’s early death, Anne remained deeply engaged with the collection and the field more broadly; as the leading authority on Joachim Wtewael and author of the standard monograph on the artist, she was renowned for her scholarly rigor and generosity, leaving a legacy that exemplifies connoisseurship, intellectual seriousness, and a lifelong dedication to Dutch and Flemish art.

For Property from the Collection of Anne Lowenthal in Part II, please click here.

This marks the first presentation of this masterpiece by Perugino in New York, an exceptional occasion that allows for a renewed exploration of a painting that remains today in the very palace for which it was originally conceived. The work served as a cimasa, the crowning element of an altarpiece, forming the uppermost section of the so-called Polyptych of the Decemviri, commissioned by the governors of Perugia for the Palazzo dei Priori, the city’s oldest public palace and now home to the National Gallery of Umbria. At the time of the commission, Perugino was widely celebrated as the “greatest master in Italy,” the most admired and sought-after painter of the peninsula, actively courted by its leading rulers and patrons.

Christ stands within his sarcophagus, humbly displaying the stigmata: the wounds to his hands from the nails of the Cross and to his chest from the soldier’s lance. Painted with Perugino’s consummate command of anatomy and a deliberate restraint of dramatic pathos, the figure emerges from a dark background, heightening its sculptural presence. The inscription on the original frame—ADORAMUS TE XPE (“We adore you, Christ”)—echoes the words spoken during the progression through the Stations of the Cross at Easter, when the body of Christ is offered to the faithful, as in the Eucharist. Here, Christ presents his suffering directly to the viewer, offering an image of solace and devotional contemplation.

The exhibition of the work was made possible thanks to the generous support of Brunello Cucinelli and the Friends of Umbria.