The painting, painted in 1966 by the Spanish master for his Arabian Nights collection, exceeded estimates by more than 20,000 euros when it was auctioned on October 23 in Cambridge.

Its price was estimated at between 23,000 and 34,000 euros at the end of July. Finally, on October 23, a buyer paid a whopping 51,000 euros to buy the painting Old Sultan by surrealist artist Salvador Dalí at an auction at the Cheffins auction in Cambridge. Made by the Spanish artist in 1966, it was authenticated as one of the 500 frescoes that make up the Arabian Nights collection, highlighting the cultures of the Middle East, but which has never been made public, reports The Guardian.

The Old Sultan, one of the fifty paintings in this mysterious collection, disappeared in 2014 before resurfacing nine years later, when a sixty-year-old antique dealer bought it for the modest sum of 200 euros at a garage sale in Cambridge. The buyer then noticed stickers on the back of the painting evoking an auction at Sotheby’s in the 1990s. He also spotted Salvador Dalí’s signature in the lower right corner of the canvas made of water color and marker strokes.

The happy owner, who felt “uncertainty and doubts” before paying 4,500 euros to have the painting authenticated and research its provenance, told the Guardian that he was “over the moon” after the sale. “It was incredible, simply extraordinary,” he told our British colleagues. As for the auction house Cheffins, director Brett Tryner says that this auction has aroused “incredible” interest, because Salvador Dali’s works “don’t often show up on the market”.

The Old Sultan, also known as Vecchio Sultano, is a painting that divides art lovers. In 1963, wealthy Italian patrons Giuseppe and Mara Albaretto asked the Spanish painter to illustrate a Bible. Dali preferred to launch into a performance of the collection of tales The Thousand and One Nights in a Moorish style, inspired by the arts of Islam. The representation of the “sultan” is therefore subject to interpretation, while only 100 of the 500 pages of the collection were made by the painter.

Source- Le Figaro