Christie’s Old Masters evening sale in London set a new auction record for Canaletto on Tuesday, when his painting *Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day* (circa 1732) sold for £31.9 million with fees ($43.7 million), far exceeding its £20 million estimate. The work, once owned by Britain’s first prime minister Robert Walpole, drew five bidders and sold to an anonymous phone bidder via Christie’s international director Alice de Roquemaurel. The previous Canaletto record of £18.6 million was set at Sotheby’s in 2005.
The sale matters because it demonstrates sustained strong demand for top-tier Old Masters, injecting energy into a market segment that often lags behind modern and contemporary art. The painting’s price is now the second-highest for an Old Master at Christie’s London, behind only Rubens’s *Lot and His Daughters*. Christie’s reported a 99 percent sell-through rate by value for the evening, the highest in its Old Masters sales history, signaling robust collector confidence in blue-chip historical works.