The Napoleon Bonaparte collection of French dealer Pierre-Jean Chalençon was sold on Wednesday at Sotheby’s Paris for $9.6 million.
The 112 lots offered on the auction block included a variety of objects – from furniture and Old Master paintings to stockings and underwear! The auction could certainly be called a success, fetching a total of $9.6 million against a pre-sale estimate of $6.9 million. The lots had a sell-through rate of 92 percent, and more than half of the lots exceeded their estimations. A significant number of bids came from museums and galleries.
The top-selling work of the night was a portrait of Napoleon by French painter Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse, which sold for $1 million (20 times its estimate). His gilt wood imperial throne was sold for $470,510. The surviving remains of the emperor’s first will, written in 1819, fetched $558,730. An interesting lot that included his long shirt, tie, stockings, and underwear, collectively fetched almost $155,000.
Perhaps the only disappointment of the night was the bicorne hat of Napoleon, which sold for $416,000, considerably less than its $700,000 estimate. The emperor’s bicorne hats are a collector’s favorite, with one fetching $2.2 million in 2023. However, this particular hat was marred by doubts over its provenance. This is not the first time Sotheby’s has auctioned off Napoleon’s belongings. In fact, in 1823 – just two years after his death – the auction house organized a sale of his belongings from his Saint Helena residence.
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The famous general’s artifacts still evoke high interest among enthusiasts. Last month, at a Paris auction organized by Drouot, his sabre fetched a record price of €4.66 million ($5.4 million). The current sale was thanks to Pierre-Jean Chalençon, who needed to sell off his collection to pay back €10 million in loans.
