Art News

Liz Taylor-owned Dutch master sells for $2M in New York City

NEW YORK (AP).- A 17th-century portrait that once hung in the living room of Elizabeth Taylor’s Bel Air home — and was only recently reattributed to the Dutch master Frans Hals — sold at auction Wednesday for $2 million. “Portrait of a Man,” painted in the early 1630s, went to a buyer bidding by phone at Christie’s sale of Old Masters. Its presale estimate had been $700,000 to $1 million. A Hals scholar, Seymour Slive, had listed the painting as a “doubtful” work by the Dutch artist in a 1974 catalog, judging by a black and white photo of the work. After Taylor hung it in her California home in the 1950s, “It academically fell off the radar,” said Nicholas Hall, head of Christie’s Old Master paintings. But last summer, Christie’s and Pieter Biesboer, the retired curator of Old Master paintings at the Frans Hals Museum in Holland, confirmed the work was by Hals. “From 20 yards away one could tell that it was an utterly authentic