Auction Room shot. © Sotheby's Images

LONDON.- Sotheby’s inaugural Evening Sale of Russian Art tonight exceeded all expectations and realised a total of £25,731,100 ($53,137,295), £2 million more than the pre-sale high estimate (pre-sale estimate £15.9-23.5). The auction got off to a remarkable start with the first three lots – triptych icons – all selling for well above their pre-sale high estimates, and the fourth lot offered, Konstantin Makovsky’s From the Everyday Life of the Boyars, set a new record for the artist at auction when it sold to a telephone bidder for £2,036,500, £1.3 million over its high estimate of £700,000. The sale also saw 12 new records achieved for Russian artists, 18 works sell for over $1 million and almost 70% of works sell in excess of their high estimates. The top selling work was the avant-garde masterpiece Bluebells by Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova, from the Schreiber Family Collection, which commanded £3,044,500.

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