Rare Giacometti chandelier bought £250 and can sell for up to 7cm.

When the English painter John Craxton bought a chandelier from an antique shop in London, it seems he made a very good choice.

The painter bought the unusual chandelier suspected to be the work of the great sculptor Alberto Giacometti for £250.

Now the chandelier, made in the late 1940s, could be sold at a Christie’s auction in a few weeks for up to £7 million, according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.

Creations by the Swiss artist are the most expensive works of sculpture that can be bought at auction.

The estimated sale price of the chandelier is £1.5 – £2.5 million, but Michelle McMallan of Christie’s acknowledges that this is a conservative starting price for a chandelier that is “extremely rare».

“The market for the designs of Alberto and his brother Diego Giacometti has never been stronger, with the top price for a Giacometti chandelier at auction being £7,602,400 in 2018 for a bronze from 1949” he said.

When the painter first spotted the unique lamp in a London shop in the 1960s, he believed it had been commissioned by his late art collector friend Peter Watson.

John Craxton, who died in 2009, hung the chandelier in his north London home. The work remained there for 50 years.

Apart from its aesthetic value, it also has a historical value, as the chandelier once adorned the lobby of the offices of the Bloomsbury publishing house of the cultural magazine Horizon, which is no longer in circulation.

John Craxton’s biographer and trustee of his estate, Ian Collins, stated that in “Chandelier for Peter Watson» distinguish the different currents of creative thought that occupied Giacometti during his productive period in the 1940s.

RES-EMP

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