Christie’s London South Asian art sale sets records as Ganesh Pyne leads £18.9 million result
Christie’s returned to London with a South Asian art auction that quickly signaled how far the market has moved. On June 11, the house’s first sale of the category in the city since 2019 brought in £18.9 million with fees, sold every lot, and produced more than a dozen artist records. At the center of the evening was Ganesh Pyne’s 1977 painting Fisherman, which climbed past its £350,000 high estimate to more than £3 million hammer price, or £3.8 million with fees.
The 93-lot single-owner sale was widely identified by market sources as coming from the Kolkata-based Goodricke Group, a majority-owned subsidiary of Camellia PLC. Christie’s did not name the consignor, but the collection’s scale and focus made the source of the material easy to read for many in the room. According to Camellia’s 2025 annual report, published on April 30, 2026, the company has been selling UK-based assets, including art and investment properties, to improve profitability.
The Goodricke holdings were assembled largely through auctions in the 1990s and early 2000s, just before the first major Indian art market boom of the mid-2000s. Founded in 1977 in West Bengal, the collection was built around artists associated with Bengal, especially Pyne. Twenty-six works by the artist accounted for nearly one-third of the sale’s lots, alongside works by Jamini Roy, Meera Mukherjee, Ram Kinkar Baij, and Somnath Hore.
Pyne’s Fisherman was the evening’s most dramatic result. The tempera on canvas, rendered in his signature bleak and haunted register, set a new auction record for the artist and did so on what would have been his 89th birthday. The work had last sold at Sotheby’s in 1997 for less than £7,000, a reminder of how sharply the market for South Asian modern art has revalued itself.
Another standout came early in the sale: a 1922 portrait of Mahatma Gandhi by Abanindranath Tagore sold for £820,000 hammer price, or £1 million with fees, more than 15 times its £50,000 high estimate. The result nearly doubled Tagore’s previous auction record of £409,000, set at Christie’s New York in 2013.
The sale also showed that the category’s center of gravity is still shifting. Unlike many South Asian modern art auctions, this one was not dominated by the Bombay Progressives. Only one work by a member of that group appeared: VS Gaitonde’s untitled deep orange canvas from 1971, which made £2.2 million with fees. Other strong results included KK Hebbar’s Untitled (Woman Making Chapatis, 1959) at £406,400 with fees and Biren De’s December ’72 (6) (1972) at £120,600 with fees.
Christie’s international specialist Damian Vesey said the June timing proved effective, but added that future programming would remain case by case. The sale drew collectors in the room, including Kiran Nadar, Kito de Boer, Taimur Hassan, and Dara Mehta, as well as online bidders from China, Thailand, the US, and India. For now, London has shown it can still command serious attention in South Asian art — even if the market’s long-term calendar remains centered elsewhere.
