Sotheby’s sale of Indian Art in London realised £4,289,775, a figure handsomely in excess of pre-sale expectations (estimate was £2.4-3.4 million). The sale, which was extremely well attended both during the pre-sale exhibition and in the saleroom today, saw spirited and competitive bidding throughout. It demonstrated that the international profile of and market for Indian Art continues to surge forward. 67% of the lots in today’s sale sold for prices in excess of their pre-sale high estimate and an impressive 11 new auction records were established for names including Rabindranath Tagore and Jitish Kallat, among others. A new auction record by medium was also set for Subodh Gupta.Commenting on the success of today’s sale, Zara Porter- Hill, Head of Indian Art at Sotheby’s, London said: “Indian Art continues to prosper – it's a market on the move. We collated a carefully edited sale with superlative examples from across the board and we are thrilled with the response that we’ve witnessed. We saw strong and encouraging prices achieved throughout today’s sale, with both Modern and Contemporary works performing equally well. Bidding came from a very international audience, which included private collectors, institutions and the trade. The auction was a great success and we now look forward to the international Contemporary sale in New York later this month which features a select group of works by Indian Contemporary artists.”The sale offered some 120 lots of exceptional quality and provenance which traced the course of Indian Art over the last century and encompassed works by key figures of the Modern Indian Art movement, such as Francis Newton Souza and Akbar Padamsee, through to the cutting-edge names of Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher and Jitish Kallat.The sale’s top selling lot was Francis Newton Souza’s (1924-2002) The Red Road, which was hotly contested by at least seven bidders before selling to a client on the telephone for £580,500; the painting had a pre-sale estimate of £250,000-350,000. One of the stars of the Modern section of the sale, the canvas was a gift from Souza to his wife Maria in 1962, a period widely acknowledged as the artist’s most successful, and it was later bequeathed by Maria to the present owner. The painting was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in 1989.