Six minutes into Christie’s first auction of South Asian art in London since 2019, held on 11 June, the hammer fell on a 1922 portrait of Mahatma Gandhi by Abanindranath Tagore for £820,000 (£1m with fees)—more than 15 times its £50,000 high estimate. This result roughly doubled the auction record for Tagore, a prominent member of the storied Bengali artistic family. Before the sale this record stood at £409,000, achieved in 2013 at Christie’s New York.
Over the past three years, such dramatic price escalations have become par for course in the market for South Asian 20th-century art, and Christie’s 93-lot single-owner sale was no exception. The white-glove auction made £18.9m (with fees), vastly outperforming its £2.9m to £4.3m pre-sale estimate (calculated without fees), and netted records for more than a dozen artists, including prominent names such as KK Hebbar—£406,400 (with fees) for Untitled (Woman Making Chapatis, 1959), and the Neo-Tantric painter Biren De—£120,6000 (with fees) for December ’72 (6) (1972).
While Christie’s did not disclose the identity of the sale’s consignor, numerous sources active in the South Asian art market have identified them as the Kolkata-based Goodricke Group, which is a majority owned subsidiary of the UK-headquartered Camellia PLC. According to Camellia’s 2025 annual report, published on 30 April 2026, the company is selling off some UK-based assets, including art and investment properties, to increase profitability.
Abanindranath Tagore’s Mahatma Gandhi, The Spinner of a Nation’s Destiny (1922)
The Goodricke collection was amassed largely from auctions, including those held at Christie’s, during the 1990s and early 2000s, shortly before the first Indian art market boom of the mid-2000s. Founded in 1977 in West Bengal, its focus was on then-contemporary artists associated with Bengal, with particularly strong holdings of the painter and draughtsman Ganesh Pyne—26 works by the artist accounted for almost one-third of the 11 June sale’s lots—as well as Jamini Roy, Meera Mukherjee, Ram Kinkar Baij and Somnath Hore.
The star lot of the sale was Ganesh Pyne’s Fisherman (1977), a tempera on canvas rendered in the artist’s signature eerie, bleak style. Seven minutes of bidding saw the work vault past its £350,000 high estimate to hammer at more than £3m, (£3.8m with fees), setting the late artist’s new record, and fittingly on what would have been his 89th birthday. The work was last sold at Sotheby’s in 1997 for less than £7,000.
The auction was notable for being a South Asian sale of Modern art not weighted towards works by the Bombay Progressives, an artist group that dominates the category. Just one work by such an artist, VS Gaitonde’s untitled, deep orange canvas from 1971, featured in the sale, making £2.2m (with fees).
The decision for Christie’s to stage this sale in London, outside of its bi-annual New York auctions of South Asian Modern and contemporary art, appears to be have been driven by size and strength of the UK-based consignment. It does not appear likely that the sale’s strong results will convince Christie’s to commence regular South Asian sales in London. Christie’s international specialist Damian Vesey, who led the organisation of the sale, says that “while this sale demonstrates the effectiveness of June positioning, programming decisions going forward will continue to be made on a case-by-case basis”.
Nonetheless, the sale’s timing during the June “London season” meant that it received significant foot traffic from South Asian art’s leading collectors, most of whom maintain homes in UK capital. Bidders in the room included Kiran Nadar—whose eponymous New Delhi museum will take over Christie’s London headquarters next month—Kito de Boer, one of Pyne’s most prominent collectors, Taimur Hassan, and Dara Mehta.
The sale also received a wide geographic range of online bidders, including from outside the traditional South Asian diaspora hubs. Notably, bids via Christie’s Live came from China and Thailand, as well as the US and India.
