Art buyers find ‘lost’ works

A painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau that had been missing for 160 years sold for $24.4 million at a London sale Tuesday by Christie’s International.

“La Surprise,” a 14-inch-high oil-on-panel of lovers embracing beside a man tuning a guitar, was bought by London dealer Jean-Luc Baroni on behalf of a collector he declined to identify.

The painting, dating from about 1718, had been found last year by Christie’s specialists in the corner of a drawing room of a British country house which the auction house would not name. It was sold at an auction in Paris in 1801, documented in a will in 1848 and then assumed to have been destroyed.

Watteau is credited with inventing the genre of the “fete galante,” bittersweet scenes of lovers dressed in theatrical costumes in idyllic landscapes. He died of tuberculosis in 1721 at age 36.

Meanwhile, three sketches by Goya, presumed lost for 130 years, sold for $8 million.

Christie’s said the sketches first went up for sale in Paris in 1877 and were presumed lost until a private Swiss collector contacted the auction house about them.