The biggest crowd ever seen in Christie's auction rooms assembled last week for the first day of the auction of the late Sir George Lindsay Holford's collection. The throng included Dutch bidders eager to retrieve native masterpieces, English bidders eager to keep the best of the Holford collection in England, and American bidders, most powerful of all, who were only eager to buy the pictures and sell them for gain. When the sale began these rival groups sent prices up at the rate of $15,000 a minute. The first 60 paintings went for $1,800,000; Rembrandt's Man with a Cleft Chin, probably...
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