The Underbidder Set the Price

The loser sets the price and the record leaves them out

A hammer price at auction is the last losing bid plus one increment, so the number every record prints was set by the person who didn't get the object, and the winner only confirmed it. We pulled every auction result out of the 285 published records in this archive and kept the 14 where the room's second party is documented, described or expressly missing. In six the underbidder is named or identified by role: a dealer for a Washington museum, two national museums in Paris, a Milan banking foundation, a Greek consul general, a Brussels gallery and an agent for an Asian collector. In the Turner of 2025 the losing institution is named but the last rival bid isn't. Five records say the underbidder is unknown. Two had no auction at all, and both objects were later seized.

Who loses is the surprise. Where this archive knows the underbidder, it is usually a museum or a state. Private losers stay private. Institutions leave a minute, a press statement, an appeal or a minister's regret, and that paperwork is how the name survives. The named underbidders are a biased sample, and the bias runs towards the public purse that couldn't stretch one more step.

Juan de Pareja, 1970: Washington under New York, and no premium in the room

The Velazquez portrait of Juan de Pareja sold at Christie's London on 27 November 1970, lot 110, for 2,200,000 guineas, which is 2,310,000 pounds, to Wildenstein for the Metropolitan Museum. The Met's provenance line, which we read on its object page, ends in those words: to Wildenstein for The Met. It was the first painting past a million pounds at auction and there was no buyer's premium, so the bid and the invoice were one number.

Who pushed Wildenstein there is in an archive box in London. The National Gallery catalogues item NGA27/24/17/15 as two copies of Geoffrey Agnew's account of his firm's attempt to buy the picture for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, lost to Alec Wildenstein's bid for the Met, and titles it The One That Got Away. The 1970 record was a contest between two American museums through two London dealers. Agnew's ceiling isn't published, and our record leaves it open.

The Concert, 1892: two national museums cancelled each other out

Vermeer's The Concert was knocked down at the Hotel Drouot in Paris on 5 December 1892, lot 31 of the Thore-Burger sale, to Fernand Robert bidding for Isabella Stewart Gardner, who signalled him from the room with a handkerchief. Essential Vermeer's catalogue gives the line as no. 31, to Robert for Gardner. The underbidders were the agents of the Louvre and the National Gallery in London, and the accounts agree on what happened: the two agents realised they were bidding against each other rather than against a private buyer, and both withdrew. Two figures circulate, 29,000 francs from the museum's records and 31,175 francs elsewhere; the second is the first plus the 7.5 per cent Drouot charge, and our record reads them as hammer and total.

The Gardner Museum's own page sat behind a bot check every way we tried it, so the 1892 detail rests on the catalogue literature we did open. The case adds two public underbidders who set a price and then declined to defend it. The picture has been missing since 18 March 1990, and 29,000 francs is still the only sum anyone has paid for it.

Codex Leicester, 1994: a Milan foundation, one bid short

Leonardo's Codex Leicester sold at Christie's New York on 11 November 1994 for 30,802,500 dollars, a figure that includes the buyer's premium and is still quoted almost everywhere as the hammer. The winner bid by telephone and was anonymous on the day; Bill Gates was named on 12 November. The underbidder was named at once. The Seattle Times reported a bidding war between Gates's representative and one from Milan's Cariplo Foundation, backed by one of Italy's largest banks, and the Los Angeles Times gave the same identification. The estimate had been 10 to 15 million dollars, so the loser carried the price to twice the top estimate.

This is the clearest case in the archive of an underbidder trying to bring an object home and losing by one increment. Within days Gates said he would lend the manuscript to the institution he had outbid. The loser got the loan. Our record reconstructs the hammer at 28 million dollars and labels it as a reconstruction.

Archimedes Palimpsest, 1998: a state stopped at 1.9 million

The Archimedes Palimpsest was sold at Christie's New York at 2pm on 29 October 1998 to an anonymous collector for a hammer of 2,000,000 dollars, the figure the Archimedes Palimpsest Project gives on its own history page; the press reported 2.2 million, which is the price with the ten per cent premium. The sale went ahead over an injunction sought the day before by the Greek government and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, who argued the book was stolen.

The underbidder was the Hellenic Republic. Archaeology magazine's report states that Greece's consul general in New York bid up to 1.9 million dollars before dropping out, and quotes the culture minister Evangelos Venizelos saying his country had raised a great amount of money to buy a treasure it considered stolen. An underbid of 1.9 against a hammer of 2.0 is the tightest measurement in this archive of what an object was worth to its second party: one increment of 100,000 dollars and a state would have owned the only copy of The Method. We don't know the consul's ceiling, only where he stopped.

Turner, 2025: the loser everyone can name is not the underbidder

Turner's The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent's Rock, Bristol, sold at Sotheby's London on 2 July 2025, lot 28 of sale L25033, for a hammer of 1.5 million pounds against an estimate of 200,000 to 300,000 pounds, which we read on the lot page. The Art Newspaper gives the hammer, about 1.9 million with fees, and Sotheby's Julian Gascoigne counting five active bidders: two in the room, one absentee and a telephone bidder who won for a private collector in the United Kingdom.

The named loser is the Bristol Museums Development Trust, which raised 109,120 pounds from more than 1,700 donors in a week and wrote afterwards that it had been outbid. But a trust aiming near the 300,000 pound high estimate wasn't the last rival one step below 1.5 million. The underbidder in the strict sense is one of the four other bidders and isn't identified anywhere we could read. Bristol lost the object and said so in public; whoever set the price lost quietly.

Cimabue, 2019 and Botticelli, 2021: a gallery and an agent, both unnamed

The Cimabue Mocking of Christ made 19.5 million euros at the hammer, 24.18 million with fees, at Acteon in Senlis on 27 October 2019, and The Art Newspaper's report of the day sets out the last three bidders. Giovanni Sarti bid for a client to around 15 million and stopped, leaving a contemporary art gallery from Brussels against Francesco Ortenzi of the Moretti gallery, who won for the Alana Collection. The Louvre attended, couldn't pre-empt for want of funds, refused the export certificate on 20 December 2019 and completed the purchase on 25 October 2023. The underbidder is described by trade and city and has never been named.

The Botticelli Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel hammered at 80 million dollars at Sotheby's New York on 28 January 2021, 92.2 million with fees in the house's release and 92.1 million in The Art Newspaper. Bidding was thin and slow from 78 to 80 million and closed between Lilija Sitnika of the Russia desk in London, whose client won, and Alexander Bell of the Old Master department. Sotheby's own newsflash says the ultimate under-bidder was bidding on behalf of an Asian collector. A region and nothing else is as much as any house in this archive volunteered.

Does a named underbidder make a price more reliable?

A named underbidder makes a price more legible, and the Codex Sassoon shows the underbid matters more than the name. The codex sold at Sotheby's New York on 17 May 2023 for a gavel price of 33.5 million dollars and 38.1 million with fees, both reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, against an estimate of 30 to 50 million. Alfred H. Moses had lodged an irrevocable bid of 32.5 million before the sale; an anonymous rival reached 33 million and Moses went to 33.5. The rival has never been named, and it hardly matters. The underbid tells you a rival went 500,000 dollars above a floor agreed in advance, and the winner one step beyond that.

The lot page adds something the reporting missed: it carries both the Irrevocable Bids and the Guaranteed Property symbols, with the note that the auctioneer may bid up to but not at the amount of the irrevocable bid. So the depth of this price is one increment over a guaranteed floor. Compare the two private treaty sales. The Met paid 3.5 million euros for the coffin of Nedjemankh in July 2017, and Hobby Lobby paid 1,674,000 dollars for the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet through Christie's London in July 2014. Neither figure has any depth, because nobody else was asked. Both objects were seized in 2019, and the United States alleged that the tablet's sellers chose a private sale because its provenance wouldn't survive a public one.

Why the second name is missing, and what to do about it

Auction houses publish a hammer or a total and treat every bidder's identity as confidential, and we found no written house policy that says so, only the practice across these fourteen sales. Sotheby's named a region for the Botticelli underbidder; for the Sassoon it let the underbid out and not the bidder; for the Magna Carta, the Clark carpet and the Rothschild Prayerbook nothing reached print. The Rothschild egg is the best illustration. Andrei Ruzhnikov of Aurora Fine Art told Bloomberg there were only two bidders and that it was insane to pay more than 8 million pounds for the egg, and declined to say whether he was the one who lost.

Treat the second name as a source to be found rather than a fact to be read off. Where the loser was public, look for the loser's own paper: an archive box in London, a foundation's statement in Milan, a crowdfunding page in Bristol, a minister in Athens. Where the loser was private, expect nothing and read the hammer as a number with an unknown second party one step below it. Where there was no auction there's no second party at all, and both of the archive's private treaty prices ended in a seizure.

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