Focus on Portrait of a Young Man holding a Roundel and discuss the History and ownership.
The first modern record of the painting was in 1938, when it was owned by Baron Newborough of Caernarvon. At the time, the art dealer Frank Sabin visited the Newborough estate and appraised the painting's value. Lord Newborough was ignorant of the true value of the painting, so Sabin managed to buy the piece for a relatively low price. Art historians assumed that the painting came into the possession of the Newborough family when the 1st Baron Newborough, Thomas Winn, lived in Florence, Italy between 1782 and 1791.Sabin sold the portrait to the collector Sir Thomas Merton in 1941 for a five-figure sum. During Merton's ownership the portrait was first described as a work by Botticelli. The attribution to Botticelli was doubted later, as prominent monographs on Botticelli did not include the portrait as one of his. Currently a majority of the art historians accept the attribution to Botticelli. While the Merton family owned the portrait, it became the subject of a poster for a Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition of Italian Art in 1960. In 1982, Merton's descendants sold the painting for £ 810,000 at an auction at Christie's.After Sheldon Solow bought the piece in 1982, the portrait was loaned to major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, where it was displayed in a Botticelli exhibition in 2009–2010. In January 2021, the portrait was sold at an auction at Sotheby's New York for more than US$92.2 million to a Russian-speaking collector. The price for the painting was the highest paid for a Botticelli and the highest for an Old Master work since Leonardo Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi sold in 2017.
Städel Museum Royal Academy of Arts Sir Thomas Merton Florence Salvator Mundi Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition of Italian Art monographs Leonardo Da Vinci's Städel New York Italy Christie's Sotheby's Sheldon Solow National Gallery Old Master Thomas Winn London Baron Newborough US$ Metropolitan Museum of Art