The highlight of Old Masters week was Jusepe de Ribera’s charged “Prometheus,” which blew past estimates of £800,000–1.2 million to set a record for the artist at £3,849,250.

Sotheby’s Old Masters sale on July 8 kicked off with 56 lots of Renaissance and Baroque masterworks from the collection of Barbara Piasecka Johnson, the Johnson & Johnson heiress who was a major collectors in the 1970s and ’80s. Nearly half of the works in the collection were Old Master paintings, all of which found buyers. The highlight of the session — and, indeed the most talked-about painting of the week — was Jusepe de Ribera’s Prometheus, an emotionally charged canvas with a strong appeal to modern taste, depicting the Greek god being tortured by an eagle that feeds on his liver every day. The painting was last sold 20 years ago by Matthiesen Gallery in London for around $300,000, according to Guy Stair Sainty, a London dealer in European paintings who describes Ribera as “a 17th-century Francis Bacon.” Some seven bidders competed for the work, which sold — to great applause — to a European buyer in the room for £3,849,250 ($6.3 million) (est. £800,000–1.2 million), a record auction price for the artist. “Strong, direct images are well received by today’s market,” said Alexander Bell, co-chairman, with George Gordon, of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings worldwide.

The Johnson session fetched a total of just under £10 million against a pre-sale estimate of £5.2–7 million. Of the 56 lots, 44 found buyers, for a sold rate of 94.6 percent by value and 78.6 percent by lot. The salesroom had little interest in the collection except for the Ribera, though, and almost all of the action took place over the phones, while the audience talked loudly among themselves, to the dismay of Henry Wyndham, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, who was the auctioneer for the evening. They were waiting for the various-owners evening sale, which began at 7:30, an hour and a half later.

That session realized £26,134,050, toward the low end of the pre-sale estimate range of £24–37 million, with 33 of 48 lots finding buyers for a sold rate of 81.6 percent by value and 68.8 percent sold by lot.

It was not a night for pretty pictures. A pair of paintings of young women by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, jointly estimated at £2.5–3.5 million, failed to attract much interest or a buyer, and the highlight of the sale was a depiction of the Massacre of the Innocents by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (who also saw success at Christie's earlier this week), which brought £4,633,250 (est. £2.5–3.5 million). The painting was “as good as it gets and in extraordinary condition,” said George Gordon. The price was the second highest paid for a work by the artist at auction.

Three telephone bidders competed for Sir Anthony van Dyck’s half-length Portrait of Endymion Porter, which brought £2,057,250 (est. £1–1.5 million). Gordon, who described the estimate as being on the “conservative side,” described Porter — a diplomat, connoisseur, and courtier to Charles I, as well as a close friend of the artist — as “a terribly significant sitter.”

Gabriel Metsu’s A Woman Selling Game from a Stall sold to London dealer Johnny van Haeften for £1,161,250 (est. £1.2–1.8 million), failing to achieve its estimate but setting an auction record for the 17th-century Dutch artist nonetheless. Another painting that sold a little below expectations was George Stubbs’s Portrait of Baron de Robeck Riding a Bay Hunter (1791), which brought £2,057,250 (est. £2–3 million).

But the total for the evening's two sessions was £36,022,635, a figure that Bell pointed out was higher than the totals achieved at Sotheby’s June evening sales of Impressionist and modern art (£33,531,150) and contemporary art (£25,549,450) and that Gordon called a “confidence booster.” Bell also went so far as to describe the market as “healthy and strong — a little selective, but no more than it would have been a year ago.”

Still, a year ago, Sotheby’s July Old Master sale earned £51,488,650 on expectations of £30–44.2 million, with 69 of 90 works moving for a sold rate of 76.2 percent by lot and 93 percent by value and the house’s second highest total for a single session of Old Masters ever.