LEXINGTON, KY (Nov. 21, 2016) – Andre Pater’s Red Arrow, 2016, sold for $276,000, including buyer premium, following a spirited bidding duel be the highest-priced work at the fourth annual Sporting Art Auction, held Monday at Keeneland.
Pater was on hand to watch the competition for his Red Arrow, 2016, a 36” x 24” pastel signed by the artist. The painting depicts a Lakota warrior, approximately 1870, wearing a buckskin war-shirt decorated in locks of horsehair and scalps along his arm, and draped in a buffalo robe.
Gross sales for the Sporting Art Auction, a collaboration between Keeneland, the world’s premier Thoroughbred auction house, and Cross Gate Gallery of Lexington, the country’s foremost gallery of fine sporting art, totaled $2,478,710.
The 2016 collection featured 175 high-quality lots representing fine sporting art, American paintings, and sculpture by world-renowned artists. Seventy-five percent, or 131 pieces offered in the auction, were sold.
Paintings by LeRoy Neiman brought the evening’s second-highest prices, with his works Seattle Slew and Epsom selling for $115,000 each, including buyer premium.
Neiman’s Seattle Slew is a 45¾” x 68¼” acrylic signed by the artist. Neiman sketched champion Seattle Slew outside his barn at Belmont Park in 1977, the year the colt won the Triple Crown. In his book Horses, Neiman wrote that he had Seattle Slew “affix his signature to the drawing. His hoofprint is in the lower right corner just over my signature.”
Also selling for $115,000 was Neiman’s Epsom, a 23½” x 36” acrylic on board, also signed by the artist, dated ’63 and inscribed “Epsom.”