Biography
Gregory Rubinstein joined Sotheby’s in 1990, and three years later became Worldwide Head of Old Master Drawings. In 2013 he also took on responsibility for Early British Drawings and Watercolours.
Over the years, he has overseen some 150 specialist sales of works on paper in London, New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Milan and Hong Kong, including those of many notable private collections, some of the most significant being those of J.A. Klaver, Franz Koenigs, Robert Lebel, Jeffrey E. Horvitz, A. Alfred Taubman, Jan Krugier and Howard & Saretta Barnet. Another particular highlight was the sale, in 2012, of Raphael’s Head of a Young Apostle from the Devonshire Collection at Chatsworth, achieving what is still the highest price for any Old Master Drawing ever sold at auction.
Greg’s particular area of expertise is 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art, on which he has lectured and published extensively. In 2008/9, he co-organized the major exhibition on the paintings, drawings and prints of Jan Lievens, shown in Washington, Milwaukee and Amsterdam. The following year he was a keynote speaker at the Getty Museum symposium ‘Rembrandt and his Pupils: Telling the Difference’, and has lectured on a variety of aspects of Dutch art and the art of drawing at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Amsterdam and Leiden Universities, and at many museums, including the Metropolitan.
Museum and the Morgan in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The National Gallery and the Royal Academy in London, and the National Gallery of Scotland. On a rare excursion from the field of drawings into Old Master Paintings, Greg also spearheaded and choreographed the 10-year research program that led to the reacceptance of Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at the Virginals as an autograph work, and the painting’s subsequent sale in London in 2004. Most recently, he co-curated the 2024-25 exhibition Dürer to Van Dyck: Drawings from Chatsworth House, at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh.
After studying art history at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., Greg worked in curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and at the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle. Both in his work at Sotheby’s and in his wider academic and research projects, Greg’s studies of works on paper are driven by a passion for the medium, and by a desire to be able to answer the fundamental questions regarding the making of a particular drawing: How? When? By whom? and Why? His work in the field of Dutch art was recently recognized when the Dutch Ambassador to the UK appointed him a Ridder in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau, on behalf of the King of the Netherlands.
收起