Two-sided Van Dyck work, Einstein letters on sale at Christie’s Classic Week in London | Canada Voices

An Anthony van Dyck portrait of a horse with a hidden landscape on the reverse will go under the hammer next week during Christie’s “Classic Week” events, where it could fetch up to $3.80-million.

“Andalusian Horse” is the 17th-century Flemish artist’s earliest grand-scale depiction of a lone horse, according to the London auction house.

“It has the added interest of having a second painting on the back, a sketch of a landscape which was only revealed back in 2000 when the old lining canvas was removed, and that is his only surviving landscape sketch,” Clementine Sinclair, Christie’s head of London Old Master Paintings, told Reuters.

The artwork, on offer at the Dec. 3 “Old Masters Part I” sale, has a 2 million-3 million pounds ($2.54 million-$3.80 million) price estimate.

Christie’s hosts a series of live sales from Monday and ongoing online sales as part of its Classic Week.

Prints by Dutch master Rembrandt go on sale on Dec. 5, led by “Christ crucified between the two Thieves: ’The Three Crosses’,” a depiction of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, with an estimate of 800,000–1.2 million pounds.

A Beethoven music sketch leaf for the string quartet in C, Op. 59 No. 3, with his cancellations and corrections (100,000-150,000 pounds) and letters physicist Albert Einstein wrote to his first wife Mileva Maric are among highlights of the “Valuable Books and Manuscripts” auction on Dec. 11.

The letters, dating 1898 to 1903 and showcasing some of Einstein’s early scientific thinking, have a price estimate of 700,000-1 million pounds.

An Einstein robotic head and a first edition of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” are on offer in the online “Science Fiction and Fantasy” sale.

That sale is led by “The Dune Bible,” a storyboard prepared for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed 1970s film adaption of sci-fi epic “Dune.” It has an estimate of 250,000 to 350,000 pounds.